Developing conversational skills through dialogic speech acts

Conversational competence can be developed through exposure to model interactions, supervised analysis of their formal-functional properties, and guided activities requiring ever-increasing autonomy from the learners. This paper presents an approach to the development of oral interactional skills based on these assumptions, field-tested with intermediate-level students of English at an Italian university. The aim is to enable students to build a repertoire of communicative strategies and automatize their conversational behaviour. The training material consists of 25 dialogic scripts –adapted from recordings of conversations elicited from native speakers– reproducing expressive speech acts (apologies, thanks, complaints, compliments, offers and requests). The approach involves six steps: (a) familiarization with the context and content of the dialogue, and assessment of the interlocutors’ attitude toward each other and the situation; (b) supervised practice in reading out the dialogue, with focus on intonation, chunking, expressiveness; (c) repeated role-play of the interaction: a faithful reproduction of the script later gives way to a free adaptation of it to the students’ interactional needs; (d) analysis of the interlocutors’ turns in the script by matching dialogic segments with functional glosses provided by the teacher; (e) familiarization with additional expressions that realize the micro-communicative functions identified in the dialogue; (f) role-play of new dialogic interactions in which strategies and formulas encountered before are recycled. Throughout, the teacher’s feedback focuses on the correction of the linguistic-strategic choices undermining the communicative effectiveness and social acceptability of the students’ utterances, and on the provision of expressions relevant to the students’ turn-specific goals. With this method, students become familiar with communicative choices usable as conversational building blocks; become aware of the regularities of dialogues, in which interlocutors’ turns are logically-socially motivated, mutually relevant and driven by complementary needs; and learn to achieve communicative goals while ensuring the interlocutor’s interactional cooperation and safeguarding each other’s face.