Prosody practice, pragmatics and attending skills training

At the upcoming, Annual BCTEAL conference in Vancouver next month, Angelina VanDyke and I will be doing a new workshop, one based on an excellent presentation that she did last year, entitled: Pragmatic Attending Skills Training for Oral Skills Classes

Here's the program summary: 

Clip art: Clker.com

"Being able to better facilitate development of pragmatic competencies with ELLs is a priority of most programs.  This workshop gives participants experience in combining attending skills training with prosodic pronunciation teaching techniques to enhance use of conversational strategies and responses appropriate to a variety of socio-cultural contexts."

And this excerpt from the proposal:

"This workshop uses a combination of attending skills training (Ivey, 1965; Acton & Cope, 1999) and select procedures derived from prosodic pronunciation teaching to create a framework that facilitates systematic attention to pragmatic strategies and appropriateness, with learners of a wide range of general communicative competence. [It] begins with a general overview of the use of pragmatics applied to conversational interaction teaching, followed by training modules in attending and haptic pronunciation teaching techniques."

The key to the integration of prosody and pragmatics in this case, as we have seen in research in haptics in general, is systematic use of movement and touch to "embody" prosody and expressiveness. Instruction and "uptake" of the pragmatic dimension of the interchanges take place in short dyadic conversations that provides context and opportunity for on-the-spot informal conversational analysis and anchoring of key expressions and speaker intention.

(Pragmatically speaking!), even if you are new to haptic pronunciation teaching, this one should be more than worth attending! (Check out this previous post on an attending skills workshop done at BCTEAL in 2012.) 

"Haptic" pronunciation TESOL 2013 pre-convention institute is ON!

Clip art: 

Clker

Great news! TESOL is going to allow us to offer the full-day workshop on March 19th before the convention. Early enrolment is still low but I'm confident that it will be fully "embodied" by the time of the convention. Continue to spread the word, please. Cost of full-day PCIs at TESOL is "only" $205; convention cost is around $400 now. (And they wonder why attendance is not growing?) Will propose a similar, less expensive format to the PCI in a number of venues in the coming year, once the entire AH-EPS system is publicly available online. 

If you want to host one at your school or in your neighbourhood, let us know. Keep in touch. 

TESOL 2013 Haptic Pronunciation PCI

Just heard from TESOL that as of today there aren't enough registered for the Haptic Pronunciation PCI in Dallas to offer it. Registration closes at the end of the week. We had heard last week from one of our grads that it was closed due to enrolment  and let everybody know. Not so, apparently!!! If you had planned on signing up or know somebody who might, pass on the word! This is one party that we don't want to miss! If it is cancelled, will try to figure some kind of alternative venue for at least a meeting.