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The book reports on research into teaching conversation strategies as a means of developing communicative competence. The introductory chapter defines key terms and positions this book’s aims and arguments. The next four chapters each describe a different study examining the teaching of conversation strategies in a different way: a learner corpus investigation of strategies used by both learners and users of English as a lingua franca; a materials evaluation study based on the responses of teachers in a variety of contexts; an experimental study in an ESL context, comparing the effects of teaching conversation strategies to a control group receiving no instruction; and finally a qualitative diary and interview study in an EFL context. The author concludes by discussing the implications of these studies for teachers and researchers.

This article reports on mixed methods classroom research carried out at a British university. The study investigates the effectiveness of two different explicit teaching frameworks, Illustration -Interaction -Induction (III) and Present -Practice -Produce (PPP) used to teach the same spoken discourse markers (DMs) to two different groups of Chinese learners and compared to a control group. Univariate analysis of the pre-and post-tests indicated statistically significant differences between the PPP group and III/control groups in terms of a higher mean usage of the target DMs in the immediate post-test. Qualitative results demonstrated that the PPP group generally found this method to be more useful, which tallied with their better performances in the tests. Both groups also articulated a desire for a different kind of practice to be used in class, based on rehearsal for real world tasks. This suggests a need to re-conceptualise practice within III, PPP or other teaching frameworks. RESUMENEste artículo presenta resultados obtenidos a través de una investigación en el aula en una universidad británica. El objetivo del estudio es la comparación de la efectividad de dos modelos explícitos de enseñanza diferentes: Ilustración -Interacción -Inducción (III) y Presentación -Práctica -Producción (PPP), empleados para enseñar marcadores del discurso a dos grupos distintos de estudiantes chinos y comparados con un grupo de control. Los resultados de un análisis univariado de las puntuaciones en el pre-test y el post-test indican diferencias estadísticamente significativas entre el grupo PPP y el grupo III (el grupo de control) relativas a un mayor uso de los marcadores del discurso durante el post-test inmediato. Los resultados cualitativos demuestran que, en general, los participantes del grupo PPP consideran este método más útil. Dichas opiniones coinciden con el mejor rendimiento en los tests. Otra conclusión relevante es que los dos grupos expresaron su deseo de que se aplicase otro tipo de práctica en la clase, como, por ejemplo, actividades que sirviesen de entrenamiento para tareas fuera de la clase, en el mundo real. Esto sugiere la necesidad de reformular el concepto de práctica en III, PPP y otros modelos de enseñanza. PALABRAS CLAVE:Marcadores del discurso, gramática hablada, enfoques explícitos en la enseñanza, PPP, III.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of explicit interventional treatment on developing pragmatic awareness and production of spoken requests in a study abroad context (taken here to mean those studying/using English for academic purposes in the UK) with Chinese learners of English at a British higher education institution. The study employed an experimental design over a 6 month period with 34 students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction. Instruction took place prior to departure for the UK and performance was measured based on a pre-, immediate and delayed post-test design using a computer-animated production test (CAPT); an oral discouse completion test (DCT). The findings revealed that explicit instruction facilitated development of pragmatically appropriate request language in the short term and, to some extent, this was sustained over time. The CAPT data was also analysed in order to examine the use of internal and external modification of requests by each group. Results demonstrate that the explicit instruction group used significantly more modification at the immediate post-test stage but that the control group used significantly more at the delayed test stage.