Jingles Measurement Now More Efficient Than Ever
Dear Fellow Earthlings,
Back on July 1, 2008, approximately five years before I wrote the first installment of this blog, in installment 43 of a monthly newsletter I used to write in those days, I described how I had gleaned certain portions of each of the 10 Series A Jingles as I sought to create diagnostic tools for my clients. With these tools, I would be able to tailor each client’s Jingles training program to fit INDIVIDUAL needs, making it possible to devise improved therapies for each client moving along “The Jingles Road “.
From the outset, these Jingles nuclei truly helped in diagnosing each client's individual needs. On the other hand, they proved to be of little utility functioning in the capacity of what I had intended them to do when I created them: Provide a short-cut means for practicing each Jingle. Here, I had made an assumption similar to that made by the people at the Oral Dynamics Lab of the University of Toronto back in 2005: that strings of 5-10 syllables would be long enough to function effectively in providing sufficient information for phonological analysis of individual and community phonomes.
(My "Monthly Newsletters" will become available in archived form from January 1, 2020. At that time, please see Newsletters 7 and 31 for information on my dealings with the University of Toronto. In the meantime, it IS possible to contact the Jingles office in Tokyo for reprints of the 60 Newsletters, compiled monthly from January 2005 through December 2009.)
What we see here is that The Jingles continue to evolve. The Nuclei (which now encompass the Series B Jingles as well as the Series A Jingles) now serve to cut the time needed for measuring a client’s Jingles from 30 minutes to 3 minutes for each Series. What used to take either 30 minutes or 60 minutes now takes either THREE MINUTES or SIX MINUTES!!
Both staff and clients benefit from this improvement in the efficiency of our Jingles measurement procedures.
Steve Walker
Earthsaver and Jingles Creator
© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.