Atta boys and girls!

Open Forum in English
1

In his “Speaking your way to fluency in a language” Steve mentions a teacher from San Diego who cites Attitude, Time and Ability (to listen etc) as three crucial factors. I immediately thought of all of us as ATA people until I remembered that Ata is a scouring powder used in Germany. So ATA as a label doesn’t appeal anymore.

Then I thought about the lovely form of encouragement or praise used in the UK mainly for children: “atta girl!”, (not to be confused with an IT-girl!). So, if we bring Tenacity into the equation, we could all be ATTA girls and boys!

(I obviously have too much time on my hands at the moment to come up with stuff like this.)

2

Sanna,
I appreciate your ATTempt to come up with an acronym. However, what the good lady mentioned as the three key elements were

  1. Attitude of the learner
  2. Time with the language
    3 Attentiveness or the ability to notice

So the acronym ATA still works. Great! but I prefer to think that attentiveness can be trained, and do not want to create the impression that “language learning ability” is a key to language learning. It may play role, but we do not control it.

The ATA above, we can control.