ABSTRACT
A significant development in recent decades in corpus linguistics has been the availability of corpora of everyday social conversation. In this chapter, we consider the traditional notion of the “conversation class” and how conversation is characteristically dealt with in English language courses. We then consider how a syllabus for the teaching of social conversation can be created based on spoken corpus evidence. We construct our syllabus upon four key characteristics of conversation: (1) how speakers manage their own talk, (2) how they take account of other participants in the conversation, (3) how they display active listenership and (4) how they manage the conversation as a whole. These four features involve the exploitation of a repertoire of linguistic items and features evidenced in spoken corpora, including discourse markers, response tokens, tense and aspect choices and a series of interactive chunks covering pragmatic functions such as vague language and the expression of stance. We then argue for a noticing-based pedagogy and an inductive approach to conversational language, where learners move from listening to corpus-informed conversations, through noticing activities to controlled practice to freer and personalised practice. Practical examples are given.
