© 1994 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
Teaching conversational skills intensively: course content and rationale
Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, Eötvös University, Budapest, where he is involved in teacher training and research into applied linguistics. He holds a PhD in psycholinguistics, and has written several academic papers and co-authored three EFL coursebooks.
Taught EFL in France and Hungary, and is currently a lecturer at the Centre for English Teacher Training, Eötvös University, Budapest. Her interests include the study of communicative competence and designing communicative classroom activities. She has co-authored two EFL coursebooks.
With the teaching of conversational skills a major objective of current communicative language teaching, conversation classes are becoming widespread. However, teachers are often unsure about which topic areas they should focus on, with the result that many of their conversation classes tend to be characterized by a random, intuition-based selection of general communicative activities. Drawing on the results of oral discourse theory and conversation analysis, this paper begins by providing a list of conversational teaching points to serve as a menu for teachers as they design a syllabus for their classes. It goes on to discuss how these conversational issues can be taught in practice.