Conversation Strategies

What are Conversation Strategies? They are techniques that help the speaker and listener keep a conversation going to its natural and desired conclusion. They are skills that supplement the linguistic and sociolinguistic skills most texts focus on: grammar, vocabulary, and usage. To develop strategic competence, students must learn the words, phrases, and conventions used as two speakers engage in the active give-and-take of conversation. These are the strategies we use to get more information, make comparisons, correct someone politely, agree and disagree, summarize, share information, and make decisions in a business meeting. Students also practice polite forms, rejoinders, clarifications, follow-up questions, getting a response, expressing probability, interrupting, and avoiding conversation killers. Each activity has three parts: a teacher's introduction, a written introductory exercise to be done by students individually, and pair/group practice that makes us!e of information gap and other interactive formats. -- From product description.

This innovative book examines the relationship between foreign (L2) language acquisition and task-based learning from an output perspective, with a concentration on the learner's discourse and retrospection. Author Cynthia Lee explores this issue in an experimental context; with particular reference to Hong Kong Chinese tertiary learners of English. Lee's study contributes to research on L2 acquisition and casts light on task-based learning and pedagogy in Hong Kong classrooms and beyond. English language teaching practitioners, researchers, and applied linguists will find special value in this book.

Academic Communication Skills is designed to assist international graduate students as they create their own opportunities to expand their linguistic and strategic repertoires in academic English conversations. The needs of international graduate students are often different than those of others who have learned English as an additional language because they participate in academic conversations at advanced levels, encounter daily opportunities to discuss topics about which they have sophisticated knowledge, and are required to share their expertise with others (in their roles as teaching assistants or research assistants). As students progress in their academic studies, they increasingly understand that their fluency in academic oral communications plays an important role in their academic performance and future career options. While they recognize the importance, many voice frustrations, finding that speaking English is more difficult than writing and engaging in impromptu dialogues is more difficult than presenting prepared monologues. This book is an excellent resource for either classroom instruction or for self-study. It provides effective confidence-building strategies that speakers can try when participating in a range of different academic interactions. By guiding both students and instructors in examining common conversational challenges in academic environments, including many of the assumptions that frequently cause miscommunication, the book provides proven strategies for increased effectiveness and confidence in cross-cultural academic conversations.

This book examines the topic of communication strategies, the ways in which people seek to express themselves or understand what someone else is saying or writing. Typically, the term has referred to the strategies that non-native speakers use to address the linguistic and pragmatic problems encountered in interactions with native and non-native speakers of the language in question. Studies adopting a psycholinguistic perspective are well represented and updated in this volume. Other chapters re-examine communication strategies from a sociolinguistic perspective, exploring the strategies non-native speakers and their conversational partners use to create shared meanings in ongoing discourse. These studies reveal how communication strategies can serve to construct participants' identities and social relationships. Finally, the book incorporates a number of chapters which cover strategy-like behaviour in other related areas, such as language pathology, child bilingualism, normal native adult interaction, and mother tongue education. These studies add fresh dimensions to the study of communication strategies, showing how the concept can usefully be extended beyond the realm of second language acquisition and use, and pointing out the commonalities in many domains of language behaviour.

Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics examines the intersection of climate skepticism and Christianity and proposes strategies for engaging climate skeptics in productive conversations. Despite the scientifically established threats of climate change, there remains a segment of the American population that is skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change and the urgent need for action. One of the most important stakeholders and conversants in environmental conversations is the religious community. While existing studies have discussed environmentalism as a factor within the religious community, this book positions religion as an important factor in environmentalism and focuses on how identities play a role in environmental conversation. Rather than thinking of religious skeptics as a single unified group, Emma Frances Bloomfield argues that it is essential to recognize there are different types of skeptics so that we can better tailor our communication strategies to engage with them on issues of the environment and climate change. To do so, this work breaks skeptics down into three main types: "separators," "bargainers," and "harmonizers." The book questions monolithic understandings of climate skepticism and considers how competing narratives such as religion, economics, and politics play a large role in climate communication. Considering recent political moves to remove climate change from official records and withdraw from international environmental agreements, it is imperative now more than ever to offer practical solutions to academics, practitioners, and the public to change the conversation. To address these concerns, this book provides both a theoretical examination of the rhetoric of religious climate skeptics and concrete strategies for engaging the religious community in conversations about the environment. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of climate change science, environmental communication, environmental policy, and religion.

Some people worry about participating in social settings because they lack confidence in their conversation skills. They may dread an evening at the pub or even just a chat with one friend, for fear of saying the wrong thing, not being able to think of anything to talk about, or whether they will find themselves feeling generally embarrassed about their conversational technique. This book offers a structure to help with the skills needed for initiating, maintaining, and ending conversations. It looks at casual chat and formal talk with one person face-to-face and on the phone, as well as how to converse in a group. There are over 30 chapters, each dealing with an aspect of conversation such as Greetings How to remember names Being topical, Using humour Reminiscing Repairing conversational gaffs, Escaping! The Conversational Menu Each topic is considered and discussed; exercises are suggested; "homework" is given on credit-card-sized cards, and then the Checklist is filled in, so that learning is secure. This is a complete course on conversation skills. designed for people over 16, either to work with the Speech and Language Therapist, or for some, to work on their own. Alison Roberts is a Speech and Language Therapist whose work has chiefly focused for the last 20 years on the communication needs of 11-25 year-olds with a wide variety of intriguing differences in ability. She works with several brilliant therapists who together form a team called Good Communication. Alison lectures to SLT students and to Careers Advisers and has written several sets of cards and books which have been published by Speechmark Publishing. She is also an enthusiastic craftswoman with an endless need and desire to devise her own SLT games, which gave rise to the original series of articles in the Speech and Language Therapy in Practice magazine.

What do you do when you need to express the meaning of a word that you don’t know in a foreign language? How do you start and close a conversation, and how do you keep it going? What can you do if you are not sure about what to say in an unfamiliar situation?Communication strategies is a book about the ways and means that users of a second or foreign language can employ when they have to face problems due to gaps in their linguistic, communicative or intercultural competence. Strategies also enable them to deal with uncertainty in personal and intercultural contacts and to increase their autonomy in using languages.Communication strategies is both a handbook for teachers, teacher trainers and educators, providing them with a sound methodological background, and a collection of 30 practice activities, games and tasks for language learners and users. Photocopiable worksheets are provided, as well as freely downloadable recordings of native and non-native speakers of English.

The activities in this book follow and build upon the strategic conversation skills of the Kehes' book, Conversation Strategies. Discussion Strategies develops discussion skills at high levels of communicative interaction, especially communication in academic settings. Students, in step-by-step procedures, are given extensive practice in a variety of strategies for leading and participating in a discussion. Discussion Strategies provides focused practice with the following discussion techniques: using rejoinders, asking follow-up questions, seeking and giving clarification, using comprehension checks, answering with details, soliciting more details from others, interrupting others during a discussion, recounting something they have heard, volunteering an answer, helping the leader of a discussion, expressing an opinion, referring to a source when giving an opinion, and leading a discussion. Each unit builds on and recycles the previous units. The first twenty-eight units provide controlled practice of the discussion and are for pair groups or triads. Units 29-38 give the students an opportunity to use their new strategies in less structured discussions; they involve large groups or the whole class in open discussion of the articles provided.