Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

164
Box 9.2 Classroom input and language teaching
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Everything the teacher does provides the learner with opportunities for
encountering the language.
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Be aware of the two levels at which language enters into the classroom.
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Be aware of the different sources of input.
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The input that the students are getting is far more than just the sentences
they encounter.
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Students learn what they are taught (in some sense).
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What works in the classroom in one cultural milieu may not work in another.

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9.3 Describing conversation
Describing conversation 165
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Think of a way of starting a conversation. When would you use it? How
would you teach it?
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What do you do if you realize someone has not understood what you 
have said?
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How do you respond when someone pays you a compliment?
Focusing questions
Conversation Analysis: the discipline that studies conversational interaction by
close analysis of transcripts (Note: this is often abbreviated to CA; in the older
SLA literature, however, CA stands for Contrastive Analysis, mentioned in
Chapter 1)
adjacency pair: a pair of conversational turns such as question and answer
repair: the way that the speaker or listener gets the interaction back on course
when something goes wrong
Keyword
When people talk to each other, they are constructing a conversation by making
particular moves and by responding to the moves of others. For 50 years people
have been trying to describe how this works.
The first interest in SLA research came through the work of Evelyn Hatch and
her associates, who called her approach ‘discourse analysis’ (Hatch, 1978). The
starting point was how L2 users interact with native speakers. The opening move
in a conversation is to get someone’s attention:
A: Hi.
Next the participants need to establish what they are talking about – topic
nomination:
A: Did you see the news in the paper?
At last they can say something about the topic:
A: There’s been a bridge disaster.
In a second language we may need to establish the topic more firmly. The listener has
to make certain they have grasped what is being talked about – topic identification:
B: There’s been a what?
To which the other person may respond with topic clarification:
A: An accident with a bridge that collapsed.
Often we need repairs to keep the conversation going:
B: A fridge that collapsed?
A: No, a bridge.

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Conversation is driven by the attempt to get meanings across to someone else; it
comes out of the topic we want to talk about.
My beginners’ coursebook, People and Places (Cook, 1980), was based partly on
the ideas of Hatch (1978), using conversational categories such as initiating topic
(‘You know Edna?’), checking (‘What?’), repeating (‘Edna?’), stating facts (‘Edna is an
old-age-pensioner’) and confirming (‘Yes, that’s right’). These were incorporated
into a teaching exercise called a conversational exchange. First students get
some sample exchanges, with alternative forms for each move:
identifying:
A: My name’s Mickey Mouse.
checking:
B: What?
confirming:
A: Mickey Mouse.
acknowledging:
B: Oh I see, Mickey Mouse.
Then they have to invent exchanges with other celebrity names taken from pic-
tures; finally they supply names of their own to put into the exchange. While this
teaching exercise reflected conversational interaction, it was highly controlled;
the students were not negotiating for meaning so much as learning the patterns
and moves for negotiating for meaning. A similar type of exercise is used in