This paper describes an action research project undertaken to look into the
e=ectiveness of tasks designed to raise learner awareness of conversational
strategies. The goal was to test whether tasks and direct instruction aimed at
promoting learner awareness of conversational language at the discourse-level
had any impact on the students’ performance. Excerpts from transcripts of
students’ conversations are included to illustrate how such activities can be
e=ective in improving student performance on conversation tasks.
Speaking as a skill Much work has been directed towards examining teacher–student
interactions, and a number of instruments have been designed to analyse
the patterns of interaction in the classroom (Malamah-Thomas 1987).
However, less attention has been paid to the kind of discourse that
student–student interaction produces. This oversight needs to be
addressed, since most ELT coursebooks do not deal with speaking by
breaking it down into micro-skills work. Instead, they often have the
vague aim of ‘promoting learner ?uency’. This paper argues that direct
instruction strategies can be applied to help learners develop speaking
skills, and in particular to become aware of patterns of interaction.
With the emphasis that communicative language teaching (CLT) places
on oral production, by the time most students reach intermediate level
they can produce fairly extended spoken discourse. Course designers and
teachers employ a repertoire of role-plays, gap tasks, and the like,
whereby students are initially guided through the conversations aided by
role cards, diagramming, or other types of prompts. As the students’ level
increases, they are gradually given fewer cues, and must substitute more
spontaneous language use for prescribed exchanges. Such techniques
are unarguably a good way to get the students to practise speaking, which
in turn helps them to develop their ability to produce coherent, ?uent
sentences, or their discourse competence.
What has been largely overlooked is that practising conversation also
entails knowing how to use language to interact (Dörnyei and Thurrell
1994). Students’ success in two-way communication does not just
depend on what they produce, but also on how e=ectively they are able to
participate in conversational exchanges. We have come to recognize that
conversation ‘involves far more than knowledge of the language system
and the factors creating coherence in one-way discourse; it involves the
14 ELT Journal Volume 59/1 January 2005 © Oxford University Press
doi: 10.1093/elt/cci002