Conversational Discourse

The benchmark of successful language acquisition is

almost always the demonstration o fan ability to
accomplish pragmatic goals through Interactive
discourse with other speakers of the language.

Teaching Pronunciation
Because the overwhelming majority of adult learners
will never acquire an accent-free command of a
foreign language, should a language program that
emphasizes whole language, meaningful contexts,
and automaticity of production focus on these tiny
phonological details of language? The answer is yes.
Accuracy and Fluency
In spoken language the question we face as teachers is: How shall
we prioritize the two clearly important speaker goals of accurate
(clear, articulate, grammatically and phonologically correct)
language and fluent (flowing, natural) language?
Its now very clear that fluency and accuracy are both important
goals to pursue in CLT (Communicative Language Teaching)
and/or TBLT (Task-Based Language Teaching). While fluency may
in many communicative language courses be an initial goal in
language teaching, accuracy is achieved to some extent by
allowing students to focus on the elements of phonology, grammar,
and discourse in their spoken output. Fluency is probably best
achieved by allowing the stream of speech to flow.
Affective Factors
One of the major obstacles learners have to overcome in
learning to speak is the anxiety generated over the risks
of blurting things out that are wrong, stupid, or
incomprehensible. Because of the language ego that
informs others that you are what you speak, learners are
reluctant to be judged by hearers. Our job as teachers is
to provide the kind of warm, embracing climate that
encourages students to speak, however halting or broken
their attempts may be.
The Interaction Effect
The greatest difficulty that learners encounter in attempts
to speak is not the multiplicity of sounds, words, phrases,
and discourse forms that characterize any language, but
rather the interactive nature of most communication.
Conversations are collaborative as participants engage in
a process of negotiation of meaning. So, for the learner,
the matter of what to say is often eclipsed by conventions
of how to say things, when to speak, and other discourse
constraints.
Questions about Intelligibility
A now outdated model of English language teaching
assumed that intelligibility should be gauged by
whether nonnative speakers are intelligible to native
speakers. Materials, technology, and teacher
education programs are being challenged to grapple
with the issue if intelligibility, and to adopt new
standards of correctness and new attitudes toward
accent in order to meet current global realities.
The Growth of Spoken Corpora
The intelligibility issue is now being described as a rapid
growth of readily available corpora of spoken language
one of the key developments in research on teaching oral
production. As the size and scope of corpora expand, so
our understanding of what people really say is informed
by empirical evidence. Of special interest to teachers of
English worldwide is the wider range of language varieties
that are now available through such projects as the
International Corpus of English, which contains data from
the spoken Englishes of Hong Kong, New Zealand, the
United Kingdom, Ireland, Nigeria, the Caribbean, and
others.
Genres of Spoken Language
Research on spoken language has recently attended to a
specification of differences among various genres of oral
interaction, and how to teach those variations. What is
judged to be acceptable and/or correct varies by contexts,
or genres, such as small talk, discussion, and narrative,
among others. As research more accurately describes the
constraints of such genres on spoken language, we will
be better able to pinpoint models of appropriateness for
students specific purposes in learning English.
In beginning through intermediate levels of proficiency,
most of the efforts of the students in oral production
come in the form of conversation, or dialogue. As you
plan and implement techniques in your interactive
classroom, make sure your students can deal with both
interpersonal and transactional with whom they are
quite familiar.
Clustering
Fluent speech is phrasal, not word-by-word.
Learners can organize their output both cognitively
and physically through such clustering.
Redundancy
The speaker has and opportunity to make meaning
clearer through the redundancy of language.
Learners can capitalize on this feature of spoken
language.
Reduced Forms
Contractions, elisions, reduced vowels, etc., all form
special problems in teaching spoken English.
Students who dont learn colloquial contractions can
sometimes develop a stilted, bookish quality of
speaking that in turn stigmatizes them.
Performance Variables
One of the advantages of spoken language is that the
process of thinking as you speak allows you to manifest a
certain number of performance hesitations, pauses,
backtracking, and corrections. Learners can actually be
taught how to pause and hesitate. For example, in
English our thinking time is not silent; we insert certain
fillers such as uh, um, well, you know, I mean, like, etc.
one of the most salient differences between native and
nonnative speakers of a language is in their hesitation
phenomena.
Colloquial Language
Make sure your students are reasonably well
acquainted with the words, idioms, and phrases of
colloquial language and that they get practice in
producing these forms.

Rate of Delivery
Another salient characteristic of fluency is rate of
delivery. One of your tasks in teaching spoken
English is to help learners achieve an acceptable
speed along with other attributes of fluency.

Stress, Rhythm, and Intonation
This is the most important characteristic of English
pronunciation. The stress-timed rhythm of spoken
English and its intonation patterns convey important
messages.

Interaction
Learning to produce waves of language in a vacuum
without interlocutors- would rob speaking skill of its
richest component: the creativity of conversational
negotiation.

Microskills
1. Produce chunks of language of different lengths.
2. Orally produce differences among the English phonemes
and allophonic variants.
3. Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and
unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonational
contours.
4. Produce reduced forms of words and phrases.
5. Use an adequate number of lexical units in order to
accomplish pragmatic purposes.
6. Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery.
7. Monitor your own oral production and use various strategic
devices (pauses, fillers, self-corrections, backtracking) to
enhance the clarity of the message.
8. Use grammatical word classes, systems, word order, patterns,
rules, and elliptical forms.
9. Produce speech in natural constituents in appropriate phrases,
pause groups, breath groups, and sentences.
10. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
Macroskills
Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
Accomplish appropriately communicative functions according to situations,
participants, and goals.
Use appropriate registers, implicature, pragmatic conventions, and other
sociolinguistic features in face-to-face conversations.
Convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as
main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and
exemplification.
Use facial features, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal cues along with
verbal language to convey meanings.
Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies, such as emphasizing key words,
rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words, appealing for
help, and accurately assessing how well your interlocutor is understanding you.
Imitative
A very limited portion of classroom speaking time
may legitimately be spent generating human tape
recorder speech. Imitation of this kind is carried out
not for the purpose of meaningful interaction, but for
focusing on some particular element of language
form.

Intensive
Intensive speaking goes one step beyond imitative to
include any speaking performance that is designed
to practice some phonological or grammatical aspect
of language. Intensive speaking can be self-initiated,
or it can even form part of some pair work activity,
where learners are going over certain forms of
language.
Responsive
A good deal of student speech in the classroom is
responsive: short replies to teacher or student-
initiated questions or comments. These replies are
usually sufficient and do not extend into dialogues.

Transactional (dialogue)
Transactional language, carried out for the purpose
of conveying or exchanging specific information, is
an extended form of responsive language.
Conversations, for example, may have more of a
negotiative nature to them than does responsive
speech.
Interpersonal (dialogue)
These conversations are a little trickier for learners because
they can involve some or all of the following factors:
A casual register
Colloquial language
Emotionally charged language
Slang
Ellipsis
Sarcasm
A covert agenda
Extensive (monologue)
Finally, students at intermediate to advanced levels
are called on to give extended monologues in the
form of oral reports, summaries, r perhaps short
speeches. Here the register is more formal and
deliberative. These monologues can be planned or
impromptu.
Focus on both fluency and accuracy, depending on your objective.
Provide intrinsically motivating techniques.
Encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful contexts.
Provide appropriate feedback and correction.
Capitalize on the natural link between speaking and listening.
Give students opportunities to initiate oral communication.
Encourage the development of speaking strategies.
Indirect approach: In which learners are more or less set
loose to engage in interaction. Implies that one does not
actually teach conversation, but rather that students acquire
conversational competence, peripherally, by engaging in
meaningful tasks.

Direct approach: involves planning a conversation
program around the specific microskills, strategies, and
processes that are involved in fluent conversation. Explicitly
calls students attention to conversational rules,
conventions, and strategies.

Sample tasks teaching various aspects of
conversation an oral grammar practice technique
Conversation indirect (strategy consciousness-raising)
Conversation direct (gambits)
Conversation transactional (ordering from a catalog)
Meaningful oral grammar practice (modal auxiliary would)
Individual practice (oral dialogue journals)

Current approaches to pronunciation contrast starkly
with the early approaches. Rather than attempting only
to build a learners articulatory competence from the
bottom up, and simply as the mastery of a list of
phonemes and allophones, a top-down approach is now
taken in which the most relevant features of
pronunciation-stress, rhythm, and intonation are given
high priority. Instead of teaching only the role of
articulation within words, or at best, phrases, we teach
its role in a whole stream of discourse.

Factors that affects
learners pronunciation
All six of these factors suggest that any learner who
really wants to can learn to pronounce English
clearly and comprehensibly.
1. Native language: it is the most influential factor
affecting a learners pronunciation. If you are
familiar with the sound system of a learners native
language, you will be better able to diagnose
student difficulties.

2. Age: generally speaking, children under the age of
puberty stand an excellent chance of sounding like a
native if they have continued exposure in authentic
contexts. Beyond the age of puberty, while adults will
almost surely maintain a foreign accent.
3. Exposure: one can actually live in a foreign country for
some time but not take advantage of being with the
people
4. Innate phonetic ability: it is often referred to as having
an ear for language, some people manifest a phonetic
coding ability that others do not.

5. Identity and language ego: another influence is ones
attitude toward speakers of the target language and the
extent to which the language ego identifies with those
speakers. Learners need to be reminded of the importance of
positive attitudes toward the people who speak the language,
but more important, students need to become aware of the
second identity that may be emerging within them.
6. Motivation and concern for good pronunciation: some
learners are not particularly concerned about their
pronunciation, while others are. If that motivation and
concern are high, then the necessary effort will be expended
in pursuit of goals.

Item types and tasks for
Assessing Speaking
1. Imitative speaking tasks:
Minimal pair repetition
Word/phrase repetition
Sentence repetition

2. Intensive speaking tasks:
Directed response
Read-aloud (for either pronunciation or fluency)
Oral sentence completion
Oral cloze procedure
Dialogue completion
Directed response
Picture-cued elicitation of a grammatical item
Translation of a word, phrase, or sentence or two
3. Responsive speaking tasks:
Picture-cued elicitation of response or description
Map-cued elicitation of directions
Question and answer
Question elicitation
Elicitation of instructions
Paraphrasing

4. Interactive speaking tasks
Oral interviews
Role plays
Discussions and conversations
Games

5. Extensive speaking tasks:
Oral presentations
Picture-cued (storytelling)
Retelling a story or news event
Translation of an extended text
Evaluating and scoring
speaking tasks
First you need to be clear in specifying the level of language
you are targeting. One or more of at least six possible criteria
may be your target:
Pronunciation
Fluency
Vocabulary
Grammar
Discourse features (cohesion, sociolinguistic appropriateness,
etc.)
Task (accomplishing the objective of the task)
Grammatical Competence
In order to convey meaning, EFL learners must have
the knowledge of words and sentences. That is, they
must understand how words are segmented into
various sounds, and how sentences are stressed in
particular ways.
Discourse Competence
In addition to grammatical competence, EFL learners
must develop discourse competence, which is
concerned with intersentential relationship. Whether
formal or informal, the rules of cohesion and
coherence apply, which aid in holding the
communication together in a meaningful way.
Sociolinguistic Competence
Learners must have competence, which involves
knowing what is expected socially, and culturally by
users of the target language, that is, learners must
acquire the rules and norms governing the
appropriate timing and realization of speech acts.
Strategic Competence
Strategic competence, which is the way learners
manipulate language in order to meet communicative
goals is perhaps the most important of all the
communicative competence elements. It refers to the
ability to know when and how to take the floor, how
to keep a conversation going, how to terminate the
conversation, and how to clear up communication
breakdown as well as comprehension problems.
Developing Learner
Autonomy
Underpinning the rationale for a learner-centered
approach to the development of discussion skills is
the need to encourage students to become
increasingly independent and self- directed in their
learning.
Selection of Topics for
Discussion
Free choice of topic may well be of particular
importance in monolingual classrooms, in which the
common cultural background of the learners might
limit the range of topics of potential interest; it may
also determine the degree of convergence students
adopt to target-language phonological and lexico-
grammatical norms.
Using Minimal Responses
One way to encourage learners to begin to
participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal
responses that they can use in different types of
exchanges. Minimal responses are predictable, often
idiomatic phrases that conversation participants use
to indicate understanding, agreement, doubt, and
other responses to what another speaker is saying.
Recognizing Scripts
Some communication situations are associated with a
predictable set of spoken exchanges -- a script.
Greetings, apologies, compliments, invitations, and other
functions that are influenced by social and cultural norms
often follow patterns or scripts.
Instructors can help students develop speaking ability by
making them aware of the scripts for different situations
so that they can predict what they will hear and what they
will need to say in response. Through interactive
activities, instructors can give students practice in
managing and varying the language that different scripts
contain.
Using Language to Talk
About Language
By encouraging students to use clarification phrases
in class when misunderstanding occurs, and by
responding positively when they do, instructors can
create an authentic practice environment within the
classroom itself. As they develop control of various
clarification strategies, students will gain confidence
in their ability to manage the various communication
situations that they may encounter outside the
classroom.
Conclusion
After taking a look at the teaching speaking process in a second language
we come to the realization that it is not an easy task.
Through the analysis made in this presentation we noticed the fact that
there are many hurdles to be overcome in order to succeed in our task as
teachers taking our students to a level where they can master the
language with proficiency.
These tools given here are intended to make teachers proficient in their
teaching.
Developing pronunciation, fluency, stress, and intonation and so on
accurately in our students lives will provide them with effective ways to
communicate effectively when speaking in a second language with
speakers of such a language.