ABSTRACT
Bakhtin (1986) claimed that a speaker’s command of a given language is demonstrated through his or her ability to use the heterogeneous and dynamic speech genres of that language. Native speakers exhibit varying degrees of competence in the use of these genres, depending on their experience. Through socialization and contact with others, native speakers acquire these genres over time. This has important repercussions for second and foreign language pedagogy, in that we cannot expect learners to acquire a facility with these genres without careful modeling, guided rehearsal, and feedback regarding their performance. In this chapter I explore some of the ways in which tokens of one particular genre of spoken Japanese-Japanese business telephone conversations-may be used in second language classrooms to foster the development of learners’ pragmatic competence in that language.
