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!) 

A "reptilian brain" approach to pronunciation teaching (What Haskel says neuroscience says!)

Clker.com

Fun, superficial, slightly funky 2015 blogpost by Haskel at Neurosciencemarketing.com on marketing, appealing to the "Reptilian brain". "Appeal to neuroscience" (what was formally called "brain research") has now become one of the favorite foils of both educators and comedians. A recently discovered "bug" in the use of fMRIs may cast some additional, welcome doubt on that, in fact.  No matter what you want to "sell" . . . there seems to be some neuroscientist's often pseudo-scientific research study to back you up.

Haskel identifies 7 findings of neuroscience that suggest how to market anything (even your pronunciation teaching, I assume!) as long as you aim your pitch right at your students' "reptilian brains": pain, selfishness, contrast, tangibility, beginning and endings, visual metaphors, and "strike an emotional chord".
 
A. Pain - "All native speakers hate you because of your pronunciation or accent! Shed it!"
B. Selfishness - "Your accent is your identity, your inner Komodo. Next time somebody criticizes it, just tell them to be more multicultural and get over it!"
C. Contrast - "Have a good snake as a model: Justin Trudeau, David Cameron, Vladimir Putin or Barack Obama--take your pick."
D. Tangibility - "You do these tongue twisters long enough, they'll fix anything--including your lizard-like sun-tanned appearance."
E. Beginning and end - "Imagine your pronunciation now and how it will sound at the end of this course. Fill your mind with new sounds . . . Channel your inner cameleon (See C!)"
F. Visual metaphor - "Watch this CT-scan of me pronouncing 'th' several times tonight, especially my darting tongue." 
G. Strike an emotional chord - "All those notes in the book and in research about how hard it is to change your pronunciation are just a crock! You can do this!"

Coming soon: A pre-frontal (brain) peon to Teacher Cognition research in pronunciation teaching.

Daily Digital (Orthodox Jewish devotional style) Life Litany for Protection, Direction and Stewardship

Caveat emptier: This post was drafted with help from an AI assistant (Perplexity)— but ideated and edited extensively by the human, Bill Acton.

Clker.com

Morning—Before Going Online

Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, 

     Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has given us minds to create and tools to connect across great distances.

Ribono shel Olam, 

     Master of the World, You see all—the hidden and the revealed. You know every word before it is on my tongue (Psalm 139:4).

Today I will enter the digital world: screens, searches, messages, accounts.

Help me to walk in Your ways even there:

• To guard my tongue (shmirat halashon) in every text, email, and post.
• To remember that lashon hara (evil speech) is still lashon hara, even when typed.
• To keep my eyes from what is forbidden (shmiras einayim).
• To use my time—Your gift—wisely, not squandering it on emptiness (hevel).

Guarding Identity and Household

HaShem, 

     You commanded us to "guard your soul diligently" (Deuteronomy 4:9).

In this generation, I must also guard:

• My name and reputation (shem tov),
• My family's financial security and personal information,
• My accounts, passwords, and digital footprint.

You have provided tools in our time—services like IDShield—to watch over these things:to alert me to threats, to monitor for fraud, to help restore what is stolen.

Help me to be a wise steward (shomer), not anxious but watchful, using these protections as part of my responsibility to guard what You have entrusted to me.

Seeking Justice and Counsel

You commanded us: "Justice, justice you shall pursue" (Deuteronomy 16:20).

Thank You for systems of law and for accessible legal counsel—services like LegalShield—that help families navigate contracts, disputes, and daily legal questions with integrity.

Help me to seek counsel when needed, to act justly in all my dealings, and to protect my household from exploitation.

Midday Awareness

Ribono shel Olam, 

     as I move through my day online and offline, keep me mindful:

• Am I honoring Shabbat boundaries when Shabbat comes?
• Am I treating others with kavod (respect)?
• Am I remembering that "the world stands on three things: Torah, service, and acts of loving-kindness" (Pirkei Avot 1:2)?

Let my digital life serve these foundations, not undermine them.

Evening—Before Logging Of 

Where I used technology well today—to learn Torah, to help others, to fulfill my responsibilities—I thank You.

Where I wasted time, spoke without thinking, or let my eyes wander to what is not good, I confess it and ask for Your forgiveness and strength to do better tomorrow.

"Cast your burden upon the Lord, and He will sustain you" (Psalm 55:23).

Tonight I place my identity, my data, my accounts, my family, and my legal concerns into Your hands.

"He who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps" (Psalm 121:4).

Baruch Atah Adonai, shomer amo Yisrael la'ad.

     Blessed are You, Lord, who guards Your people Israel forever.

Amen.

wracton@gmail.com

williamacton.legalshieldassociate.com

Talking (and analyzing) Pragmatics with Students: Meta-pragmatics and Embodied Prosody!

Great news! Just approved! That is the title of our upcoming half-day, 4-hour Pre-convention Institute at that the 2023 TESOL Convention in Portland (probably) March 20, 2023. Here is the current program summary:

This PCI focuses on "dialogic” meta-pragmatic analysis, where instructor and students together, analyze pragmatic aspects of conversations that students have just participated in. That is done by first producing rich, conversational interaction which is then analyzed and embodied to be remembered using, in part, haptic pronunciation teaching prosodic techniques.

Here is original proposal that Angelina Van Dyke and myself submitted that unpacks more of what it is about:

There is no shortage of "talk" about pragmatics in research and pedagogy. This PCI explores ways of working “meta-pragmatically” in the classroom with students, examining pragmatic features of discourse. That is done utilizing several techniques that produce rich, conversational interaction which is then analyzed and embodied to be used later.

In terms of methodology of teaching pragmatics, currently most involves (a) explaining what pragmatics, basically awareness and performance in context-appropriate conversational interaction, (b) exploring examples of interaction with model pragmatic features, or classroom practices such as roleplay, and identifying effective strategies and (c) reflecting on classroom exercises or personal experiences in various ways, (Hennessy, Calcagni, Leung & Mercer, 2021).

What is often missing are two elements: an effective framework for setting up student-produced conversational narrative (for context and analysis) and strategies for helping learners remember what they have worked with. In part in response to that key “bridging” gap or function between classroom pedagogy and spontaneous speaking, an especially adapted version of “cooperative attending skills training” (CAST) (Acton and Cope, 1999) is used to produce “pragmatically-rich,” short conversations with potential for metapragmatic analysis by instructor and students. Additionally, complementing the meta-pragmatic dialogic analyses, in order to enhance memory and clarity of expression, entails embodiment of new, alternative or corrected forms and expressions, using movement, tone and touch techniques (MT3s) based on the KINETIK Method of haptic pronunciation teaching. (Acton et al., 2013).

The PCI uses as a point of departure a recent study, "Spontaneous classroom conversational analysis supporting development L2 pragmatic competence" (Van Dyke & Acton, 2022). A key feature of the classroom discourse examined in that research was "dialogic” meta-pragmatic analysis, where instructor and students together, analyze, post hoc, aspects of conversations that students have just participated in.

Join us!!!

References:
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.
Burri, M., Baker, A., & Acton, W. (2019). Proposing a haptic approach to facilitating L2 learners' pragmatic competence. Humanising Language Teaching, 3. Available at http://hltmag.ng3.devwebsite.co.uk/june19/proposing-a-haptic-approach
Hennessy, S., Calcagni, E., Leung, A. & Mercer, N. (2021) An analysis of the forms of teacher-student dialogue that are most productive for learning, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2021.1956943
Van Dyke, A. & Acton, W. (2022). 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

(Fly) Fishing for the felt sense of a relaxed stressed syllable

Clip art: Clker

Every sport has its identifiable moments when mind, body and purpose intersect, when all conscious attention is on the action, not the form of how it is being done. One of my favorite metaphors (or: haptic-a-phors) has been the flowing, relaxed upper body of the accomplished fly fisher. If nonnatives speakers are  fly fishers, it is almost always easy for them to "catch" and  integrate English rhythm and stress patterns. Although this video is not all that great (and you have to sit out the commercial) the visual of the upper body fluidity and torso nod, especially that of the instructor, is pretty good.

Fly fishing upper torso movement accompanying short phrases or sentences never fails to anchor the basic pedagogical movement pattern. (To get full haptic anchoring, have the learner "catch" the rod hand with the control hand on the stressed syllable.) If you are not a fly fisher, cast around for a different sport, e.g., a basketball slam dunk, hammering in roofing nails, playing one sforzando after another on the piano, pounding the desk with your iPad after it freezes for the last time on you . . .

The Quiet Erasure: A Phenomenological Sketch

This is a creative writing task, constructed using Perplexity AI, grounded in phenomenological concepts and current cognitive research. 

The Quiet Erasure: A Phenomenological Sketch

He notices it first as a kind of relief.

The cursor blinks at the top of a blank document — a slide deck due by Thursday, a client brief, a department memo — and instead of sitting with the mild productive discomfort that used to precede real thinking, he reaches, almost reflexively, for the prompt box. He types a question. Seconds later, the screen fills. The relief is immediate and genuine. What once demanded twenty minutes of false starts and circling now arrives pre-structured, fluent, ready for adjustment. He tells himself he is being efficient. He is not wrong.

But phenomenology asks us to attend to what is happening before the label. And what is happening, if he slows down enough to notice, is subtler than productivity. It is a shift in the quality of his interiority.

There used to be something he would call, loosely, "warming up" — the experience of a mind moving from stillness into engagement, like a muscle finding its range. He would read around a topic, hold competing framings in tension, feel the faint resistance of an idea that wasn't quite right before the right one surfaced with a small, private satisfaction. That friction was not an obstacle. It was the texture of thought itself. It was his thinking — not merely a product he owned, but a process he inhabited.

Now, increasingly, he inhabits the role of editor rather than author. He evaluates rather than generates. The AI produces the first frame, and his job is to approve, adjust, or redirect. The work is faster. The output is often impressive. And yet something in his chest registers a faint, unnameable flatness — not quite boredom, not quite alienation, but something adjacent to both.

Researchers at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy have begun calling this condition epistemic dependence — a state in which a person loses not merely specific skills but the felt sense of why he knows what he knows, and whether the knowledge is genuinely his. The intellectual struggle — the searching, the erring, the discarding, the beginning again — through which knowledge becomes anchored in the self, has been quietly outsourced. What remains is the surface: polished sentences, competent structures, reasonable arguments. What thins is the depth beneath them.

He experiences this most acutely in conversation. A colleague raises an unexpected angle in a meeting. In the past, he would have felt the click of his own framework engaging, connecting, pushing back with something earned. Now there is a beat — barely perceptible — where he searches inward and finds the cupboard less stocked than he expected. The ideas are there, but they feel borrowed, transient, like things he read once in a summary rather than wrestled with across a long afternoon.

Research using experience-sampling methods finds that heavy AI users report a measurably reduced sense of cognitive ownership — the felt experience that one's thoughts originate in oneself — along with an increase in what participants describe as "mental blankness," a passive waiting for external prompts to initiate cognition. He would not name it that. He would say, on a candid evening, that he is "a little less sure of himself than he used to be" in rooms where the tools are absent.

The phenomenological point is not that the technology is malevolent. It is that the lived experience of mind-making has been rerouted. Attention that once moved inward — into memory, analogy, the slow triangulation of meaning — now moves outward, toward an interface. The interiority does not vanish. It waits. But waiting, unexercised, begins imperceptibly to contract.

He is good at his work. The deliverables are strong. But on some mornings, staring at the prompt box before he has typed a single word, he has the strange and unwelcome sensation of not quite knowing what he thinks — of needing to ask in order to find out. And he wonders, briefly, whether the question he most needs to sit with is one he should resist the urge to outsource.

The prompt:

Beginning from the perspective of phenomenology, sketch out a roughly
500 word "picture" of the personal experience of possibly too muchreliance on AI for help in thinking and writing. Cast it in the third person (male) with as engaging a "professional" voice as possible, college-educated, working in a field such as education, business or advertising where creating text and presentations involves both research and creativity.

References: 

1. https://time.com/article/2026/04/30/ai-thinking-cognitive-offloading/  

2. https://philarchive.org/archive/BROFCT-4   

3. https://arxiv.org/html/2512.19466v1  

4. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cognitive-offloading-age-ai-new-digital-dependency-andre-r6lbe   

5. https://scholarlyengagement.com/2025/11/24/navigating-the-impact-of-excessive-ai-dependence-on-cognitive-function/ 

6. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2025/12/the-paradox-of-ai-assistance-better-results-worse-thinking 

7. https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/1jgf6eo/ai_tools_may_weaken_critical_thinking_skills_by/ 

8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12678390/ 

9. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/harnessing-hybrid-intelligence/202506/the-psychology-of-ais-impact-on-human-cognition 

10. https://philpapers.org/archive/TURTCP-3.pdf 

11. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them 

12. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09020.pdf 

13. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/is-ai-dulling-our-minds/ 

14. https://www.mentalhealthjournal.org/articles/minds-in-crisis-how-the-ai-revolution-is-impacting-mental-health.html 

15. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11130558/ 

wracton@gmail.com
williamacton.legalshieldassociate.com (Legalshield and IDshield subscription information and applying for associate positions)

Daily (Shakespearean) Digital Life Litany for Protection, Direction and Stewardship

Caveat emptier: This post was drafted with help from an AI assistant (Perplexity)— but ideated and edited extensively by the human, Bill Acton.

One of about a dozen that will be appearing on the blog, including Evangelical, Anglican,Unitarian, Orthodox, Shinto, Aboriginal, Hip hop, Gregorian, Dawkins meets Ojibwe wisdom, Hindu, and Klingon! These were all created to be experienced as read aloud, not to be simply read silently. The twin purposes for the project are to (a) provide at least a framework for a daily time of preparation, in the form of prayer or a meditation, and (b) more interestingly, to observe how AI navigates the the intersection of faith, prayer and AI!

Clker.com

 

O Thou unseen Watcher of the ways of men,

whose eye beholdeth both the secret thought

and every work that walketh in the sun,

incline Thine ear unto this my suit.

Lo, a great web is cast across the world,

of wires, lights, and voices without number.

Through it my dealings, words, and likeness fly,

swifter than any steed of flesh could run.

Morning Invocation

Before I touch these glowing glass and steel,

before I enter that vast, unseen hall

where all men meet but none do see each other's face,

I do remember: I am Thine, not theirs.

Let not the clamour of the digital throng

drown out Thy still, small voice within my heart.

Guard Thou my tongue in every message writ,

my eye from vanity and poisoned sights,

my time from wasteful chasing after wind,

my name and reputation from the thief.

The Digital Realm and Its Perils

What danger lurketh in the shadowed corners

of this new world! Identity and gold

may both be stolen by a cunning knave

who never showeth face nor draweth sword.

Therefore, I am grateful for the watch—

for tools like IDShield, which stand as sentries,

alert to threat, and ready to restore

what villainy hath taken from mine house.

And grateful, too, for counsel in the law—

for LegalShield and advocates who serve

the widow, orphan, and the common man

with fairness, wisdom, and accessibility.

Help me to use these aids with stewardship,

not fearfulness, but prudence and clear sight.

Midday Reflection

Now in the thick of this day's digital toil,

I pause to ask: Whom do I serve?

Do I spend hours upon the endless scroll,

as one bewitched, unable to look away?

Or do I rule my tools, and not they me?

Remind me, Lord, to unplug, to walk abroad,

to speak to living souls with living voice,

to rest mine eyes upon Thy handiwork—

the tree, the cloud, the faces of my kin.

Evening Examination

Now doth the day draw on toward gentle night.

I lay aside my phone, my glowing screen,

and ask Thee, Lord: How did I fare today?

Where I spoke truth and kindness, thanks be Thine.

Where I did waste the hours Thou gavest me,

or let mine eyes and heart go wandering,

forgive, and grant me strength to mend tomorrow.

For every deed is writ in heaven's book,

and every careless word shall be accounted for.

Yet Thou art merciful, and where I stumbled,

Thou dost not leave me lying in the dust.

Thou liftest up the fallen, healest the broken,

and where a thing is lost, Thou helpest me restore it.

Where harm was done, give strength to mend.

Then, as I lay my devices to their rest,

grant that my mind may also gently still,

unplugged from all the clamour of the day,

yet not from kindness, wisdom, truth, or love.

So may I rise, when dawn returns again,

not servant to this vast enchanted web,

but master of my tools and of myself.

Amen.

wracton@gmail.com

The two "shout outs" in the litany are intended as general essentials, not specific endorsements of Legalshield and IDShield systems, which I am associated with.

williamacton.legalshieldassociate.com