This paper revisits the question of why pragmatics should be taught in the foreign language classroom and demonstrates how this can be achieved effectively with materials informed by conversation analysis (CA). Since findings in CA describe systematic action sequences underlying verbal activities that display cross-cultural variation, they capture pragmatics in its most natural locus: the conversational encounter. It will furthermore be demonstrated that L2 learners may benefit from instruction with CA-based materials with the ability to anticipate, interpret and produce, socio-pragmatically appropriate verbal behaviour in the target language. CA-based materials thus provide a rich resource for language teachers based on solid empirical evidence, and effectively enable L2 learners to engage in cross-culturally variable language behaviour inside and outside of class.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, it contrasts "ritual routines" in telephone conversation openings in Iran and Germany. Specifically, it focuses on the interactional organization of the ritual "how are you" sequence in both cultures. Further, it illustrates how the ritual "how are you" sequence is expanded in the Iranian telephone conversation openings: in opening a conversation on the phone, after inquiring about one another's wellbeing the Iranian co-participants move one step further and inquire about the well-being of their respective families. Unlike Iranian telephone conversation openings, however, German telephone conversation openings often do not include the ritual "how are you". When German co-participants do perform a set of a "how are you" sequences, they are not reciprocated. The first part of the "how are you" sequence frequently functions as a topic elicitation. In other words, the response to an inquiry about the co-participant's well-being is usually topicalized. The second part of this paper presents some transfer of the culture specific differences in the telephone conversation opening routines in conversations between Iranian nonnative speakers of German and German native speakers. Specifically, it illustrates how German native speakers understand and orient to the ritual inquiries about themselves and their family as topic elicitation.

Using conversation analytic methodology, this paper investigates how ‘politeness’ and ‘face’ are negotiated in web chats. Following previous conversation analytic research (Heritage 1984), we first tie the concepts face and social solidarity to the conversation analytic concept of preference organization. We then proceed to describe the system of communication of chats, delineating some technological constraints of the medium that have an impact on the resources available for participants for indicating preferred and dispreferred turns. Specifically, we indicate that some resources available in ordinary talk-in-interaction are not available in web chats, while web chats also allow for certain resources not available in ordinary talk-in-interaction. By analyzing requests (i. e., first pair parts) and second assessments (i. e., second pair parts), we demonstrate how participants adapt their interaction to the specific environment of web chats when negotiating issues of social solidarity.

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