Conversation Strategies and Communicative Competence

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.