Some tips on teaching conversation

The way a conversation class is to be handled differs greatly from the way we handle the teaching of other skills.  I think that no other skill involves an awareness of cultural features as completely as the teaching of speaking.  It is amazing how often we take cultural awareness for granted.  Sometimes, even in advanced classes, I have had to clarify to my students that when they are talking and I repeat the last part of their utterance (Example: Student: “I was playing baseball yesterday morning”. Teacher: “You were?”), I am just showing that I am listening and that I am expecting to hear more about it.  More often that I have expected my students have interpreted my utterances as if I had not heard what they had said and they have simply repeated their previous sentence. This is an example of unawareness of the fact that, in English, the use of such brief utterance is designed to keep the conversation going and show interest.  This is a culture-related aspect because in Spanish such an utterance would be regarded as requesting for repetition.  Another important concept that makes teaching speaking a special task is style.  The differences in style are far more obvious in speaking than in any other skill.  Think of writing, for instance: some might argue that there are different styles in writing.  It is not the same style that we use when we write a letter to a friend than the one we use when writing a thesis.  However, the differences are primarily concerned with tone, level of formality, and so forth.  In speaking, the differences may involve many areas.  Compare:

Lexical: “Can I take a bit” (Can I have a piece of your cake?)

Phonological: “See’ya” (See you later)

Grammatical: “You hungry?” (Are you hungry).

Only if a learner were reading a play or a script, where the utterances are meant to reflect real life talking as accurately as possible, will he or she be exposed to such evident changes in style.  Still, reading is far less spontaneous and unexpected as speaking: the reader has the opportunity to negotiate with and analyze the uncertainty that encountering those changes might generate.  The obvious implication of this in our teaching is that we must be aware that teaching vocabulary and grammatical structures is not enough for our students to perform successfully in a second of foreign language environment.  We have to provide them with what I call extra-curricular survival strategies such as: cultural awareness, tolerance of ambiguity, tolerance of changes in style, turn taking and turn assignment.  And as it can be seen, these strategies are useful mainly in speaking tasks.