BCTEAL Online Collaborative Attending Skills Training Seminar

Still time to sign up for the next British Columbia Teachers of English as an Additional Language (BCTEAL) seminar (See description below!) 

9/23/2023 - 10/28/2023
9:30 AM - 11:30 AM Pacific

$100 for members and $150 for non-members

To enroll: https://www.bcteal.org/

Here's the official description: 

"Attending skills training, as developed initially by psychologists about 70 years ago, in essence, teaches learners (or counselors) to be good listeners while keeping a conversation going. This version of the training, a seminar for teachers of nonnative speakers, developed originally by Acton & Cope (1999), provides the skills and classroom procedures for

•  Creating groups of three or four students, who 
• Carry on an engaging, short conversations, and then 
• Review those conversations with their instructor, exploring the strategies used and key pragmatic features of the interaction and the story, itself.

The system can be done either face to face or online with students. Each session includes small breakout rooms and (modest) homework assignment, along with an optional reading list. All sessions will be recorded, so if the Saturday morning schedule doesn't work for you, you can still watch the videos!

Note: Each week a set of strategies will be introduced that, ideally, participants take to their classrooms and then report back the following week. This is the first time for me to do this seminar online (hence the nominal fee), something of a "Beta test." The plan is to offer it three or four times annually to the public and also make it available to individual schools and institutions.  Join us! Bill

Acton, W. & Cope, C. (1999). Cooperative attending skills training for ESL students, in JALT Applied Materials volume, Kluge, D. and S. McGuire (Eds.), Cooperative language teaching in Japan, pp. 50-66.

Van Dyke, A. & Acton, W. (2022b). Role-play and dialogic meta-pragmatics in developing and assessing pragmatic competence, in Pedagogical Linguistics, available online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pl.22004.van

Van Dyke, A. & Acton, W. (2022a). Spontaneous classroom engagement facilitating development of L2 pragmatic competence: A naturalistic study. Pedagogical Linguistics 3(1) 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1075/pl.20011.van

CAST away stress: The Forest Walkabout-Talkabout

If you are going to be at the 2023 BCTEAL Annual Conference on May 5th (at 11 a.m.) at the University of British Columbia, please join us, Angelina Van Dyke and myself, for a casual stroll together, with delightful accompanying conversation through the Arboretum for about an hour. 

The teaching technique demonstrated, the "walkabout," is based on two other techniques: CAST (Collaborative Attending Skills Training) and the "walkabout," a feature of Australian culture made popular by the movie, Crocodile Dundee, when the leading actor, reported having had his marriage come apart some time back . . .  because he had gone out for one in the "outback" . . . for three months! (Have reported on that technique earlier on the blog, as well.)

The CAST system, also described on the blog earlier, focuses on teaching ELLs of almost any proficiency level to carry on conversations in groups of three or four, using "attending skills," where one student tells a good story, a second facilitates the conversation, and a third takes notes on the conversation. After three or four minutes, the conversations stop and the instructor then goes around to each group and elicits examples of effective conversational discourse strategies. 

In this case, students and teacher walk through the forest for about 5 minutes as students, in the small groups, walk and talk, attending to their mutually constructed stories. They pause for about 10 minutes, reflecting on the strategies used by the attender in supporting the story teller's story, and then set off again, with three other students taking on the CAST roles. The effect is dramatic, even in the relatively short 60-minute session. (The Walkabout - Talkabout works best when carried out for about 90 minutes--or more!) 

(Note: Come prepared with a good little personal story to share, one known only to you that you can share in about 3 or 4 minutes!) 

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.) 

Treasuring listening: near-ear training for pronunciation work

clip art: Clker

Good TED talk by Julian Treasure. For enhanced interpersonal listening he ends with the acronym RASA (Receive, Appreciate, Summarize, Ask), your basic attending skills--and even world peace! What is worth "listening to," however, is how he gets there, what he terms "savouring, mixing and listening positioning." In essence, "savouring" is focusing for a period of time either on one sound in your environment---or silence--for a couple of minutes; "mixing" is focusing briefly on the sounds in your environment, one after another for maybe half a minute each; "positioning" is the process of intentionally listening with a purpose or conceptual "filter" in mind (for example, to very consciously, listen empathetically or critically or sympathetically.) Now i'm not quite sure how you do the third (positioning) in our work, but the first two forms of auditory attention management, savouring and mixing, are intriguing. Those appear to be apt, applicable analogs for what is involved in "training the body first" to attend to the felt sense of movement and somatic resonance (good vibrations in the vocal track and upper body.) I have not systematically worked with such pre-pre-listening such as that described by Treasure but it sounds like a perfect fit. First chance I get I'll "embody" some of it in an upcoming EHIEP session and report back. Hear, hear! 

"Effortless," fluent English speaking--even without conversation?

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

Wow. Once in a while you stumble on a commercial English teaching website where the claims are almost breathtaking. Here is one. There is 2-minute video by the creator of the program that is worth watching, if only to see the model of "effortless" English that he uses in pitching his stuff in the form of the promise of 7 rules and related materials which you can get for about $97--and to contrast that with what McCarthy is saying, as reported in the previous blogpost. The contrast is striking, to put it mildly. The "effortless English" system, like so many approaches to speaking fluency (as opposed to other aspects of communicative competence), is based on the concept of individual practice in private, without reference to how fluency, as characterized by McCarthy, is developed in conversational interaction.

There was a time when that, the "public speaking" approach, was the industry standard. No longer. There are, indeed, aspects of the experience of speaking a new language which appear to be "effortless." Most, however, are related to the felt sense of using what is known, not learning what to use. It is, of couse, possible to train to "speak" fluently, colourfully and rapidly--and still be utterly incapable of communicating interpersonally with the rest of us out here. ( I'm sure you know a native speaker who fits that category.) The antidote: something like attending skills. At least for the time being, there is no good substitute for f2f, or something very close to it, for developing genuine fluency. Now that's not hard to understand, is it? 

Attending skills workshop at BC TEAL

Just got word that our proposal to do Attending Skills Training: Peer monitoring in conversation instruction at BC TEAL in May has been accepted. (I'm doing it w/Mike Burri, Nate Kielstra and Mitch Goertzen.)
Here is the summary:

Clipart: Ciker

Attending Skills are a set of techniques that are effective in creating a context where students of upper beginning level and above can work in small groups and (a) practice strategies maintaining conversations, (b) become better conversational listeners and (c) provide productive feedback to classmates on speaking performance.

Developed over 50 years ago by counseling psychologists, attending skills are standard practice in most “helping” disciplines and have been applied extensively in second language teaching (Acton and Cope, 1999.) In this workshop, participants will be introduced to a method for teaching “attending skills” in classes of any size, to learners from teenage to adult. Focus of small groups is primarily to identify the use of good conversational strategies by the “attender”, not the facilitating “talker”. They will then learn strategies for instructor mediation and whole class participation, and have the opportunity to participate in a small group. At the end of the workshop, participants will be provided with complete guidelines for adapting attending skills training to their classrooms.


Acton, W. and C. Cope. (1999). Cooperative attending skills training for ESL students, in JALT Applied Materials volume, Kluge, D. and S. McGuire (Eds.), Cooperative language teaching in Japan, pp. 50-66. (That chapter is also available now online from ERIC and a few other places.) Attending skills work or something very much like it is often essential in giving learners a productive, comfortable classroom setting in which to focus on integrating new sounds. If you are in the area, hope you can attend!

Managing attention during pronunciation change: jogging the mind

This Science Daily summary of 2010 research by Seidler et al. looked at the effect of aging on inter-hemispheric connectivity in the brain. As we age, the corpus callosum (Latin: tough body)--my new nom de plum, the bridge between or manager of left and right side communication, begins losing its ability control "crosstalk," allowing random interference from the "other side," especially on motor tasks involving only one side of the body. The implications of that are far reaching.

On some cognitive (vs motor) tasks, "full brain" engagement is beneficial; on others, it may not be. (That the Tough Body in women is much larger than that of men is interesting here as well but apparently was not a relevant factor in the study.) The "good news" from the study is that aerobic exercise may function to strengthen and regenerate the Tough Body. I had some time back been using highly energetic (near aerobic) warm ups and rhythm-focus activities.

Clip art: Clker

For various reasons, I have since moved to more controlled, haptic anchoring throughout the EHIEP system, backing off from more dramatic, uninhibited and emotionally "unbuttoned" engagement. I,  personally, begin the day with aerobic work of some kind and have often observed that "exercisers" seemed to have an advantage in personal pronunciation change, especially in dealing with fossilized pronunciation.

This may help explain why, other than blowing off stress and pumping more blood into the Brocas area, regular physical exercise has been proven to complement all kinds of learning. Our general approach has been to manage attention by requiring constant, multiple modality "mindful" attention--which may also serve to further invigorate your Tough Body as well.  But perhaps it is time to reexamine that assumption, add a touch of haptic "boot camp" up front every morning! Clearly, a tougher Tough Body is worth attending to, too!

Cooperative Attending Skills Training for ESL students and haptic feedback

Clip art: Clker

I was not aware that this article by Corrine Cope and myself from 1999 on "attending skill" training was still accessible. (The linked Eric version is a relatively poor quality pdf, but still readable.) It provides what I think is still an excellent framework for creating very focused, peer monitoring group conversation where students can work on integrating in new and corrected sounds or words or phrases or strategies into their spontaneous speech. I have used some version of attending skill training in virtually every ESL/EFL class I have taught (of any size and level) and I recommend it highly. In addition to assisting students in becoming simply better listeners, it provides them with a (relatively) stress free and supportive setting where they can  experiment with new language and where peers can actually be of real value in helping them do that.

Two "haptic" applications:  (1) Learners are relaxed to the point in speaking that they have a much better chance of staying tuned in to the "felt sense" of their voice, and, consequently are more likely to detect (unobtrusively) haptic anchored-errors or changes, and (2) when peers observe a problem with a targeted element of pronunciation in one of the speakers, they, or the instructor can provide appropriate "haptic feedback," that is (possibly) saying the word or phrase using a haptically anchored corrected version or request that the speaker try to provide it in the debriefing session.

It can be clinical pronunciation work at its best--in part probably because attending skill training was developed in counseling psychology in the first place. It can also change the way you "attend to" integrating sound change in the classroom.