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!) 

Walkabout talk: The TalkaboutWalkabout

Clip art: Clker

While in Japan, while teaching speaking classes of 50+, I developed an effective (primarily kinaesthetic) technique called the "TalkaboutWalkabout," inspired by the movie, Crocodile Dundee. (It has been cited in several methods texts.) Basically, students prepared a couple of good 3-minute stories that they could tell to fellow students using an attending skills format (See earlier posts.) as homework. In the two-hour class the next day, after some initial warm up, students walked around the perimeter of the room continuously for the next 90 minutes or outside in a larger fixed loop around campus, telling their stories and listening to the story of another student--switching partners every 8 minutes (about 10 times). In effect, each student told each of two stories four times and heard eight others.

Back then I was not working with explicit haptic anchoring but it was remarkable how the pace of the walking came to regulate the rhythm of speaking, and how relaxed and fluent the conversations became. By the end, students were invariably struck by how "good" they felt about speaking English. The "felt sense" of the walkabout that they had "discovered" became our model or metaphor for how good discussions should "feel" as well.

There are, of course, any number of possible explanations for why that technique may work, several have been introduced here earlier, including jogging, but this quote from a holistic medicine website, connecting up to the function of the (somewhat mythical) Australian walkabout of Dundee,  presents an interesting perspective on some of what is involved: " . . . a journey of healing and rediscovering the link between mind, body, and spirit." The effect in your class might not be quite that heavy duty or "anchored," but I can guarantee that it will at least provide a great deal to "talk about!" 

KINETIK Roll Out Day 18: The walkabout-talkabout . . .

 . . .  for improving memory (for content and pronunciation). Check out this great summary from Neuroscience News on a study by Reser et al at Monash University, Ancient Australian Aboriginal Memory Tool Superior to ‘Memory Palace’ Learning. The bottom line parallel to pronunciation teaching:  content (or pronunciation focus) embedded in a good story in a good "place" is more memorable than just being the focus of a loosely connected class mini-lesson sitting in the third row . . . 

Today's post from Locals.com (actonhaptic@locals.com) is also listed here on the Roll Out blog page, along with the previous 17 posts! Here are links to the recent blogpost with details on the method, and more on the Acton Haptic Community on the new, upgraded actonhaptic.com website

Hot Haptic pronunciation teaching topics for upcoming conference proposals!

Here in Vancouver we are getting ready to collaborate as usual in writing haptic proposals for a couple of upcoming conferences. Here is our current list, most of which are new or emerging topics for us:

• Introducing AH-EPS v3.0 Bees and Butterflies (Serious fun!) 
• A haptic approach to teaching West Coast, BC pronunciation to others! 
• Workshop in basics of haptic pronunciation teaching
• Teaching conversational discourse orientation (the skills involved in matching the prosodics of your speech to that of the person you are talking with) 
• Embodied Confident speaking practice (The Fight club) for nonnative non-male professionals of Asian ethnicity only
• 10 warm ups for pronunciation and speaking instruction
• Stressing unstressed vowels
• Going from L1 to L2 pronunciation: Using the L1 vowel system as a point of departure
• Giving voice to voiced medial and final consonants 
• Moving conversations: the haptic talk-about walkabout (peripatetic attending skills)

There was an earlier post (March, 2014) this spring as we were cranking up for TESOL international proposals that had a few others:

• Reports from the classroom: Haptic pronunciation teaching (academic sessions)
• Research project on haptic-assisted fluency (paper)
• Haptic-assisted Rhythm instruction (Butterfly and Fight club) workshop
• Haptic phonetics (anchoring L1s in addition of L2s) demonstration
• Haptic techniques for consonant repair (workshop)
• (Haptic-enhanced) Embodied confidence (Research paper)
• Haptically anchoring word stress rules and word stress (workshop)
• Linking linking with fluency: haptic circles (mini-workshop)
• Basics of haptic-integrated pronunciation teaching 
• From intonation to expressiveness: dramatic, haptic bridges for Non-native speakers
• Haptic and kinaesthetic listening (Research paper)
• On the spot, impromptu haptic pronunciation modelling, feedback and correction 
• Haptic anchoring of Academic Word List vocabulary (demonstration or workshop)
• Sentence diagramming with movement and touch 
• Songs that touch on pronunciation: haptic anchoring of rhyme and reason (workshop)
• Teaching pronunciation to young children (workshop)
• Embodied conversational discourse markers (demonstration)
• Phonics "a la haptique!" (demonstration or workshop)
• Haptic Handwriting for L2 English learners (demonstration)
• Embodied conversational listening: haptic anchoring of attending skills
• Haptic or kinaesthetic self-monitoring

Several of those or adaptations of them were submitted to three upcoming conferences. See any you like? If a proposal was done, I can probably get that to you. If not, how about you join one of us in submitting one for a conference you are planning to attend? 

Keep in touch!