Helping students with conversation strategies

Most students that I have taught have stated that being understood by native speakers (inside and outside the classroom) is their top priority. Traditional methods of teaching speaking have tended to focus on grammar and vocabulary with oral practice usually based on these, with little or no attention actually placed on the strategies we all apply (consciously or sub-consciously) to conversations in our L1.

It doesn’t take much thought to realise just how many different speaking strategies are applied when having a natural conversation in a first language. For this reason I will focus here on what I believe to be the main four strategies: an in depth look at them would be far beyond the scope of this essay.

For much of my teaching career I tended to avoid conversation strategies and focused on freer or semi-controlled practice with a particular discrete item. For example, when teaching the present continuous, I generally, but not always, focused on a PPP style of lesson with the production stage centred around some sort of activity that avoided conversation strategies and focused on the target language, e.g. “look at these pictures, what are the people doing?”

It was some time before I realised that this wasn’t necessarily the best way of doing things. As a wise man said, “you learn the grammar and you learn some vocabulary and you make some sentences which you pronounce properly, and hey presto, you can speak” (Thornbury 2005:iv). So, without further ado, here are five ways to help students with conversation strategies:

1. Video

Watching filmed conversations and interactional exchanges can be of great benefit to learners. Video allows for a focus on paralinguistic features such as facial expressions and gestures which are missing from audio conversations. Additionally, other natural features of conversation can be easily illustrated, such as back-channeling expressions. Videos also highlight the use of hesitation devices and allow students to see how they naturally occur in conversation. Most course books come with video provided, but authentic clips on just about any topic imaginable are exceptionally easy to come by through services such as YouTube. When sourcing authentic video, it is worth remembering that “public interactions such as TV chat shows and interviews contain in them many of the features of self-contained conversation” (Cook 2001:120).

At the lower end of the CEFR, the videos that form part of the English File (Oxenden, C. & C. Lathem-Koenig 2005) series are an excellent resource. Watching these dialogues with the sound on mute allows students the chance to see the audiolinguistic nature of conversation and its powerful effect on the participants in the conversation. Following a ‘muted’ watch with a second ‘unmuted' one then allows students to see other conversational strategies, such as back-channeling and adjacency pairs, in use. Another benefit of videos is that the conversation can be replayed to allow a second or third viewing, benefiting both auditory and visual learners.

2. Live listening

Live listening is another excellent strategy for getting learners talking. It can involve two or more people holding a conversation ‘live’ in the classroom: the only requirement being that the participants must be fluent speakers of English.

The main advantage of ‘live listening’ is that of interactivity: “the [participant] can adjust [their] talk according to her perception of the learners’ level of understanding, and the learners can interact to ask questions, clarify details and solicit repeats as well as simply signal that they are listening (through backchannel devices, for example)” (Thornbury 2005:57)

The advantage of having ‘live actors’ in the classroom is that interest is generated by having real people conducting a conversation rather than a distant, disembodied voice on an audio file. Also the ‘actors’ can include things such as paraphrasing or repair strategies because they have autonomy over the direction the conversation takes. Additionally, the ‘live listening’ can be recorded to allow for multiple playbacks. The same advantages exist with live listening as they do with videos in that paralinguistic and verbal features are clearly on display: again benefiting both auditory and visual learners.

3. Lexical chunks and automisation

I have always found that students consider the learning and application of pre-fabricated lexical chunks useful when it comes to conversations. Language which is learnt in ‘chunks’ is much easier for the students to retrieve during more complicated conversational exchanges and allows them more opportunity and time (especially at lower levels) to produce them when under the relatively high-pressure situation of a real-time conversation. Intensively drilling lexical phrases for all conversation strategies is often the simplest way to aid students in both the memorisation and retrieval of these chunks.

With regard to communicative practice, there is an excellent activity in ‘Conversation Gambits’ (Keller &Warner 1988) called ‘Showing Interest’ in which students have to use pre-fabricated lexical chunks to describe an amusing event while their partner uses conversation strategies such as back channelling devices to show they are interested in the story. This activity also lends itself to the to pre-teaching of expressions such as ‘Can you say that again, please’ to help students with repair strategies.

4. Role plays

Role plays can be designed or chosen to include as many (or as few) conversational strategies as the teacher desires. A great starting point is ‘Speaking Extra’ (Gammidge 2004), which has different many role plays on various topics that can be adapted for any level.

Role plays have the advantage of relaxing the students as they can get into character and lose their inhibitions, thus lowering the affective filter. The natural use of English that students find in the real world can be replicated in the classroom without any fear of not being understood. The students can practise various conversation strategies freely and can make mistakes without ‘losing face’. In the case of back-channeling, it is beneficial for students to exaggerate them to a certain extent making them humorous and therefore memorable - this also aids kinaesthetic learners.

5. Task Based Learning

The students are ‘thrown in at the deep end’ and are given a speaking task to complete to see how they cope. After this the students are given a tape script of the model and are encouraged to notice conversation strategies such as back-channeling. Next the students are aided by the teacher who gives reactive correction before allowing students time to prepare for the more public report using the appropriate ‘upgraded’ language. 

In a simple TBL activity, such as organising a party, students would have the opportunity to work on back-channeling devices, repair strategies, paraphrasing, and adjacency pairs to successfully complete the task in groups.