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.vanVan 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
