Pragmatics: Teaching Natural Conversation

This volume offers teachers in the ESL/EFL classroom some of the first published materials for guiding learners past grammar into authentic-sounding (conventional) utterances and sequences, replacing the scripted unnatural or stilted dialogue provided in textbooks.

Teachers will find a range of pedagogical activities to put to immediate use in the classroom, as students learn turn-taking, initiations and responses for formal academic and informal conversation, thanking expressions, apologies, compliments and compliment responses, differences in complimenting behavior between men and women, opening and closing telephone conversations, and use of responders such as oh, uh-huh/ mm-hm, and yeah. Pragmatics: Teaching Natural Conversation, taken together with the previous volume, Pragmatics: Teaching Speech Acts, provides teachers with a comprehensive basis for the theoretically sound and pedagogically effective teaching of this important, but often neglected, area of language.