Teaching Conversation Through ‘Conversation’: A Case-study from Italy

Douglas Mark Ponton, Italy

Douglas Mark Ponton is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Catania, Sicily. His research interests include Second Language Acquisition, Conversation Analysis, Political Rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis. Among recent research topics are the Sicilian dialect and the linguistics of tourism in Sicily; he is currently exploring ecolinguistic issues in Sicily as part of an interdisciplinary team. E-mail: dmponton@hotmail.co.uk

Menu

Introduction
Background: English teaching in Italy
Method: teaching conversational skills
Data (i): the case study
Data (ii): reflection
Discussion: interlanguage, fossilization
Conclusion
References
Appendix A: Group description
Appendix B: Questionnaire
Appendix C: Transcripts

Introduction

This paper addresses the place of speaking skills in the teaching of English language (hereafter ‘TESOL’), in the context of Italian school age students. The issues dealt with, naturally, are probably not confined to the Italian context. The paper is based on work done in Italy, where the writer worked for some years as a lettore, or mother-tongue language specialist, in a number of secondary schools.

It is becoming increasingly the case that English learners need oral/aural skills to perform effectively as language users, and these needs have been amply recognized by modern language teaching pedagogy (e.g. Harmer 2007). However, in Italian schools, the emphasis in English instruction remains very much on structural knowledge, with speaking and listening as secondary priorities. It is an often-heard comment, among adult Italian learners, that their grammatical knowledge of English, though scholastic, is acceptable, but they slip up when they find themselves required to speak or listen. This applies to academics, businessmen, doctors and the like, who need productive skills to help them perform in a globalized context that demands competence in English with ever greater urgency. It is, therefore, quite common for Britons who live in Italy and work in TESOL to be asked for ‘lessons in conversation’, which are needed in order to supplement education that is felt to be only partial on leaving the institutional context. And this raises pedagogical questions that are the topic of this paper, i.e., how far is it possible to ‘teach’ conversation? Is this, indeed, possible at all? What might a methodology, that had as its aim the development of conversational skills, look like? Despite the voluminous literature on the subject of ‘Speaking’ (see, for example, Bygate 1987, Keller and Warner 1988, Staab 1992, McDonough and Shaw 1993, Nunan 2003, McDonough et al 2013), there is not much attention paid to ‘Conversation’, viewed either as a pedagogical device, or as an important language skill to be developed. Conversation tends to figure in the literature, as a focus for analysis, in two senses: firstly, it is naturally the main topic of ‘Conversation Analysis’, which centres on technical aspects and systemic features of this discourse form (Sacks 1992, Schegloff 1996). These studies have led to the development of a methodology that has been applied in work with a broadly sociological orientation (e.g. Tannen 2005, Peräkylä et al 2008). Secondly, insights from work in that discipline have informed pedagogical approaches to oral skills within TESOL, as writers have explored the pragmatic knowledge learners need in order to function effectively, and how far such aspects as turn-taking, fillers, ellipsis, pauses, back-channelling and the like, can be taught (Richards and Seedhouse 2005, Harmer 2007: 30).

The paper describes an experimental project conducted with a group of Italian boys whose parents, aware of the shortcomings of the educational system, had requested the writer to ‘teach’ their children conversation. In response to this request, I decided to take it as the starting point of a pedagogical Action/Research project (see Burns 1999, 2009).

Background: English teaching in Italy

In an Italian school, classroom time devoted to oral/aural skills tends to be minimal. In the best-case scenario, pupils have an hour per week with a mother tongue specialist who does try to engage these areas; more generally, the teacher goes through the grammatical structure systematically, while the national ministerial programme also requires the study of English Literature from third to fifth years (ages 16-18). Thus, a typical Italian teenager will perform a series of oral tests (known, somewhat ironically, as ‘interrogazioni’), in which, for instance, s/he repeats notes on Milton’s life and works, which are learnt by rote and forgotten the next day. However, such practices, though they seem to involve the oral dimension of language, in that the pupils are listening to the teachers’ questions, and speaking in reply, are worlds away from the notions, such as ‘communicative competence’ (Hymes 1966), that constitute the objectives of more enlightened pedagogical approaches.

This is not the place for a general critique of Italian scholastic practices (see, e.g. Chiari 2003); however, it may be observed in passing that, in neglecting the everyday, communicative aspects of language knowledge in favour of more scholastic forms of study, they are simply reproducing a general pedagogical trend that is only gradually giving way, globally, to approaches that centre on practical communicative needs. For example, in a paper that, admittedly, is now rather dated, Jane Willis estimated the average ‘talking time’ per student, during English lessons in a typical school, as no more than one and a quarter hours per year, not including time devoted to pair work (Willis 1996: 18). Willis does not have a specific country in mind; however, excluding the cases where a lettore is employed, such a figure was, at the time, probably a fair estimate for the Italian context, and is still a fairly accurate picture today.

The view that sees grammatical knowledge, rather than productive skills, as central to knowledge of a language is a familiar one in the international pedagogical debate within TESOL, which has continued at least since the years of the Skinner/Chomsky/Hymes controversies (see, e.g. Richards and Rodgers 2001, Cazden 2011), and in truth for much longer than that. The solution suggested in this paper is not intended to be definitive; rather, it describes a teacher’s attempts to grapple with these questions, and sets out some possible pathways that may stimulate debate.

Method: teaching conversational skills

In a work that champions more progressive teaching/learning contexts, Harris (2014: 74) captures something of the traditional mistrust of conversation in the classroom:

Traditionally, far too many schools and far too many teachers have treated student talk as unnecessary. In some cases, talk is seen as the enemy of a productive and efficient classroom. For decades we have assumed that the primary role of the learner is to watch and listen. Passive, compliant students are often held up as models with the goal of creating students that are seen and not heard. The predominant theory for years was that students were merely blank slates that needed to be impressed upon.

These words express a teaching context in which the prevalence of teacher talking time (TTT) over student talking time (STT), is symbolic of the power imbalance between teacher and pupil (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). In such classes, the teacher initiates, directs, controls and corrects any verbal behaviour from the students, who are, in the main, required to observe silence unless explicitly called upon to speak. The paradox of this situation is that, nowadays, for language classes, ‘Speaking’ is recognized as one of the goals to be reached, and this can hardly be achieved if the students are never to open their mouths, or to do so only in special and limited circumstances.

Recognition of the importance of speech, furthermore, is not a new phenomenon. As long ago as 1963, Earl Stevick was describing as ideal a lesson in which the students could feel that they had spent an hour in ‘free conversation’ (Stevick 1963: 60, see also Stevick 1989). However, the classroom context has features that make free conversation a hard ideal to attain, and considerations of control surely underlie the contexts described by Harris, above. Some teachers believe that conversational skills should be taught alongside structural teaching, in activities designed to promote both (Ulichny 1996). Others describe classroom activities, where student cooperation is not an issue, that successfully engage the whole classroom in productive and free conversation (Ernst 1994). In his book ‘Learning Teaching’, Jim Scrivener describes a pedagogical starting point very similar to that of the current paper, expressed at the chapter heading as follows: ‘You have been asked to include a regular discussion lesson or conversation class in your course. How could you organize this...?’ (Scrivener 2005: 146). He makes it clear, also, that the goal of such a lesson would be that students might ‘learn to speak by speaking’. However, the lessons he describes are very much a supplementary part of the language course in question and, though he does provide some practical hints to the teacher, it is not clear how shy or less able students are to be included in the activity, while the choice of current topics for discussion such as ‘globalization’, or ‘banning smoking’ may leave some of the class cold and disinclined to take part. It is clear, then, that there are advantages of (small) scale for the current study compared with the schoolroom context that will make it easier to motivate the group, consult and discuss with students over content and procedures, and so on.

Communicative second language pedagogy became widely established in the sixties, a process which culminated in the emergence of ‘Communicative Language Teaching’, which was partly based on Hymes’ work, cited above. Richards and Rodgers (2001: 161) identify what they call the ‘communicative principle’ at the heart of the philosophy of CLT, glossing it as follows: ‘activities that involve real communication promote learning’. However, even this formulation stops short of full recognition of the importance of speech, since it sees ‘communication’ as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself. In other words, the priority is still attributed to some other linguistic feature - probably structural - which is to be learnt by means of a communicative activity. This is what Jeremy Harmer has in mind when, in what has become one of the standard reference works of the TESOL profession, he describes spoken classroom activities as ‘switches’ that help learners transfer learnt language to the acquired store (Harmer 2007: 143).

However, if students are to do more than, in Thornbury’s appropriate phrase ‘vocalize grammar’ when they speak (Thornbury 2005: iv), they need approaches to speech that give it due importance alongside grammar and lexis, and prioritize activities that assist in its development. This is not to imply that TESOL does not promote speaking and listening skills; on the contrary, the pages of Harmer’s book abound in practical suggestions in this regard, and there are numerous works, as well as Thornbury’s, which are either dedicated to the development of speaking skills or give significant attention to the area, as has already been mentioned.

The problem, from my perspective, is that these works generally provide exercises for improving students’ oral skills in the context of a language lesson. They deal, in other words, with ‘Speaking’, and not with ‘Conversation’, a distinction which is also made by Thornbury and Slade (2006: 274). ‘Free conversation’, to use Stevick’s phrase, is not on offer; rather, the speaking tends to develop in controlled contexts, and it is questionable how far the kind of skills developed can be transferred, by language users, to the area of spontaneous conversation. Consider, for example, some of the activities in Harmer 2004 (345-361). These include: scripts, communication games (such as TV games like 20 Questions or Call My Bluff), information gap exercises, prepared or spontaneous discussions, prepared serious debates and balloon debates, talks, role plays, and interviews. Meanwhile Keller and Warner (1988), describe a range of exercises that try to develop skill in using conversational phrases (ibid: 17), that use visual/written cues for story construction (ibid: 12,14,22), or language games (ibid: 9). All these are excellent practical activities for a language class, and are helpful to develop oral production skills, but the potential for transferability of these latter to the sphere of free conversation is, as far as I know, an area that has yet to be satisfactorily explored.

To some extent, such controlled practice is rendered necessary by the difficulties inherent in free conversation, which are daunting, even for advanced language users (Cook 1989: 50). With the wisdom of hindsight, in fact, it may have been better to explore this ‘transferability’ hypothesis. In other words, to provide my group of would-be speakers with a wide range of more controlled activities, and then try to see whether such practice helped them when they engaged in freer conversation. However, at the time I was inclined to see if conversation could constitute both an end and a pedagogical means at the same time, and this choice led to a different kind of experiment, with different results.

Data (i): the case study

The lessons described in this study took place with a group of three Italian teenage boys, who I had met once a week for private English lessons over a period of three years, before the period in which we decided to carry out the experiment (see Appendix A for a description of the group). We got on well, and they participated in the experiment willingly, with full awareness that the lessons were being recorded, giving their consent to the procedure. As Washburn and Christianson (1995) note, taping of student oral interaction can be a useful source of motivation for the participants, and a focus for raising awareness of potential issues. Partly guided by Harmer’s suggestions as to topic, and since the boys shared a love of Heavy Metal music, we decided to use song lyrics as a stimulus for conversation and language work. Harmer, in a discussion of the affective filter, states the rationale behind this kind of lesson, that students ‘need to feel that what they are learning is personally relevant to them’ (2007: 58), while McDonough and Shaw (1993: 156) agree that, in order to be motivating to the participants, they have to feel that the subject is ‘worth talking about’. The boys would take turns to choose a song to study for the lesson; we would listen to it together and then explore the meaning of the lyrics and discuss whatever aspects emerged.

After listening back to the first few lessons, and in the spirit of self-critical introspection that characterizes action/research, I arrived at what Altrichter, Posch and Somekh (1993: 44) call the ‘first impression’. It was clear that two of the boys, Antonio and Roberto, lapsed into Italian whenever they were unable to complete sentences begun in English. In other words, two of the three practiced code switching, or ‘the use of two languages within the same conversation’ (Cook 2001: 191, see also Gardner-Chloros 2009), to a significant extent. Since, technically, the term ‘code-switching’ refers to situations of bilingualism rather than, as in this case, of L1 interference in L2 learners, I shall use the everyday terms ‘mixing’ and ‘switching’ to refer to the instances in this study. It appeared to be occurring for various reasons, which I hypothesized as follows (table one, below). The phenomenon was so persistent, indeed, that it was not easy to find, in the recorded samples, many English sentences successfully begun and completed by the two boys entirely in English. This, then, was the aspect that needed addressing if the project was to have a positive outcome.

In her work on code-switching Gardner-Chloros (2009: 1) says, of one of her students: ‘No rhyme or reason appears to govern the points at which he passes from one language to the other’. The categories in the table represent an attempt on my part to explore the reasons why mixing was occurring.

Table One: Possible reasons for language switching

Let us expand a little on these categories:

1. Difficulty of subject matter. Roberto is discussing lines in a song by Iron Maiden Remember Tomorrow, “Out in the madness the all-seeing eye/Flickers above us to light up the sky’. The discussion has taken a philosophical turn, and he struggles to express a complex idea: ‘In what sense can an insane person be said to be religious?’ After a brief struggle, he simply states his thought in Italian. This sense of ‘difficulty’ differs from the notion of ‘complexity’, which is used by writers on conversation as a discourse form (e.g. Halliday 1985, Thornbury and Slade 2006). That term is used to refer to the difficulty of constructing meaning in a linear fashion throughout the course of a conversation; here, however, is meant the inevitable semantic complexity involved in giving one’s views on topics such as this, compared to those found in the speaking practice sections of TESOL course-books - making introductions, giving directions, exchanging information, and the like. This was the most common type of mixing. The subject matter of the discussions seems to compel the boys to produce complex ideas, for which their real-time linguistic resources are inadequate.
2. Authenticity. It is one thing to produce spoken second language in controlled situations of a limited nature, for example in pair-work, drills or even role-play activities; with the teacher providing a model, correcting errors in form or pronunciation. It is another to hold a conversation in English, with all its demands on the speaker’s language resources, ‘under pressure of time and under the need to get meanings across’ (Skehan 1996: 22). Real conversation requires an ‘authentic’ use of language, in the sense that Nunan (2004: 49) uses the term, i.e. ‘spoken [..] material that has been produced for purposes of communication not for purposes of language teaching’. This requires, in the user, a correspondence between his thought and the words used to express it. Gianni, the boy least subject to switching, contrasts this with the kind of ‘fixed expressions’ (What’s your name? etc.) that constitute much of the boys’ spoken English in the school context, which pose no great difficulty.
3. Impatience. At times the desire to express an opinion seems to make the students forget the real purpose of the exercise, which is to acquire second language skills. This seems to be the case in this instance. Antonio is struggling to say that, just as in Stairway to Heaven, he admires these lyrics because their real meaning is known only to the writer. He throws in only a few English words (‘because it’s’, ‘is a programme for the’, etc.), and seems carried away by the desire to express his thoughts instantly, forgetting all about practising English.
4. Laziness. Antonio switches back to mother tongue for a phrase, ‘non penso’ (‘I don’t think so’) which is well within the scope of his English knowledge. The term laziness is not intended in a pejorative sense. However, these instances of switching are the kind that might make a teacher feel that, with a little more effort or attention to the task in hand, the student could have performed better.
5. Lack of strategies. Ironically, Gianni is unable to express his thought in English and reverts here to explain the ‘trick’ he uses to avoid switching - he finds a simpler way of saying something that may not be his precise thought, but approximates to it closely enough for the needs of the interaction. Faerch and Kasper (in McDonough 1995: 24) term this operation a ‘paraphrase’, and it is one technique of a successful communicator that would certainly be useful to the other boys.

Data (ii): reflection

At this point it was necessary to pause for reflection, to ponder the shape that future lessons would take. In Action-Research terminology, this point represents the conclusion of one cycle and the planning of the next (Burns 2010). It was a natural step to engage the group in a discussion, and I used a questionnaire as a focus for this (Appendix B). Of the questions, the most relevant were the following:

1. When you want to say something in English, what do you do?
   1. I open my mouth and start talking;
   2. I think carefully about what I want to say;
   3. I start speaking in English but then I get blocked when I don’t know a word
2. When you can’t think of something in English, what do you do?
   1. I try to think of a synonym;
   2. I ask the teacher or another student for the translation;
   3. I say what I wanted to say in Italian.

Gianni answered question four as follows, thus showing a wider range of strategic possibilities, apparently not available to the other two:

For me every answer cosi sometimes sometimes I open my mouth and I start to talk something litt-small, sometimes. Sometimes I think what I want to to say and sometimes I start to talk but I stop er when I don’t er remember something..

Question five tackles the problem of mixing directly, and it was this point that I felt needed most clarification and discussion. Antonio’s answer is particularly interesting:

A: For me b) because to think of a synonym is for me very difficult because I don’t know more synonyms er, to say what I want in Italian is stupid because non..er..cioé..non..
G: Non vuol dire niente..
A: ..non vuol dire niente..(tr. ‘it means nothing’)

This was a surprise, since Antonio is probably the student who mixes most, the one who tends to simply express his ideas in Italian.

Partly in order to confront the group with the variance that I perceived between their perceptions of what was going on and mine, I invited the group to read the transcripts at this point. The boys enjoyed reading over their contributions, and were surprised and amused by their lapses into Italian. I asked them what they thought of their ability to express themselves in English, and Antonio responded:

T: From the point of view of expressing yourselves in English?
A: Male, male..very…very bad.
T: How you express yourselves in English?
A: But we try to talk of things very difficult.. cioè diciamo che i concetti che diciamo sono troppo difficili..(tr. ‘the concepts that we say are too difficult’)

In other words, the discussion confirmed my analysis of the major source of switching, ‘difficulty of subject matter’, outlined above. I suggested some kind of simplification:

T: So should we simplify the lesson..semplificare?
R: Secondo me no because if we simplify the lesson facciamo the stesse..
T: the same..
R: .. same thing that we erm do at er school.

The idea was rejected by the group as a whole. This answer, and other observations that emerged during the discussion, confirmed that the opportunity to discuss motivating topics was valued by the group, and they were reluctant to abandon the basic premise of the lessons. The activity was perceived in a favourable light by the group, when compared with the kind of speaking practice to be found in the school context. The discussion also confirmed the notion of impatience as a factor in switching:

T: Gianni was saying was that we should try and simplify, we should try and find another way..why don’t you [the other boys] do this? R: Perché abbiamo qualche premura di esprimere secondo me il nostro concetto, la nostra opinione sull’argomento (tr. Because we are in a hurry, I think, to express our idea, our opinion on the subject)

As an idea to resolve some of the difficulties experienced in the first cycle, I suggested that we consider using some of the techniques found in Community Language Learning, a methodology that prioritizes speaking, and specifically the following:

A student whispers a message in the native language; the teacher translates it into the foreign language; the student repeats the message in the foreign language into a cassette; students compose further messages in the foreign language with the teacher’s help; students reflect about their feelings (Richards & Rodgers 1986: 303).

Here, the role of the teacher would be to offer language support when necessary. The students could continue to switch, if they felt like it, but they would know that, whenever they did switch into Italian, it would be a moment in which the flow of the conversation would be interrupted, long enough to translate their thoughts into English. They would then repeat the re-constructed sentence, it would be recorded, and the conversation would continue. At the end, the complete ‘conversation’ would be transcribed and then repeated orally by the participants. The pattern of this A/R project, then, was as follows (table two):

Table Two: The action research cycle (based on Nunan 2013: 270)

In methodological terms, this procedure is clearly not typical of the CLL approach as a whole, and it is also different from the procedures for ‘pair-taping’ discussed in Washburn and Christianson (1993; see also Schneider 1993), where students’ mistakes are included on the tape, with the aim of raising their awareness of them. In my project, this stage has already been reached, via the reading of the transcriptions. The students accepted the idea with enthusiasm, and the first ‘conversation’, about the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, went as follows:

Roberto: I think it is too carefree. I would have used an arpeggio. Antonio: In my opinion, the beauty of this song is just that..instead of being the usual boring slow song, it’s carefree. Gianni: For me, just for what Antonio said, the Rolling Stones are a great group. Real artists. Roberto: I don’t like this song, because maybe it’s too old for me. Gianni: No, I don’t agree with what Roberto said ‘cos, I like very much the old music, like Jim Morisson in the sixties, and for me this is a strange kind of hard rock of Rolling Stones..is very good, it’s great rock ‘cos for me I don’t..I’m not used to listen it very often. Antonio: I like this song because the beauty lyrics and carefree song, er, compared to Led Zeppelin music, Doors music, Deep Purple music..is more rock’n’ roll than hard rock.

Comparing this with the other transcripts (Appendix C) shows a qualitative shift. The conversation is coherent, and all three participants make their points, contributing to an ongoing discussion with no leading questions from the teacher. The discourse follows a natural course, centring on a topic of mutual interest, like an instance of free conversation between native speakers. On the negative side, of course, compared with native speaker conversation, there is a stilted, constructed feeling to the whole, and there are none of the fillers, interruptions, pauses, or shifts of thought, etc. that characterize natural native speaker conversation.

Discussion: interlanguage, fossilization

In any language teaching, the question of the students’ use of their mother tongue is always a potential issue, and one that has produced divergent opinions. Willis (1981: xiv), for instance, makes a strong claim on the negative side: ‘if the students start speaking in their own language without your permission, it generally means that there is something wrong with the lesson.’ A more tolerant position is that of Corder (1994), who provides a persuasive analysis of the process of development of interlanguage as an intermediate stage between L2 infancy and L2 competence.

Against these voices is Nattinger (1988: 70), who suggests that conversational fluency may result from encouraging what he calls ‘pidginisation’, where students ‘put the language together the best they can and avoid the self-monitoring that would inhibit its use’. However, the risk here is that ‘fossilization’, or the ‘premature stabilization of the learner’s interlanguage’ (Thornbury and Slade 2006: 101) might occur. As an instance of this, I noticed, during these lessons, that Roberto was frequently unable to produce phrases with the verb ‘to be’ requiring a dummy ‘it’, as in sentences that might begin: “it is not that I like X, but..”, and even the simple production of a negative third person singular ‘to be’ was at times beyond him. In the former he would begin ‘Not is that..’, while in the latter he would simply say, instead of ‘it isn’t possible, ‘not is possible’. These errors most probably derive from the process of translation from L1, i.e. from the Italian forms of the verb essere (to be): ‘non è che and ‘non è’.

Two questions arise here: firstly, if the needs of the communicative situation can be met by using a simplified language code, where is the incentive for the learner to improve? Secondly, the whole area of error correction, as yet not mentioned in this paper, may fruitfully be raised: if the teacher is not going to correct such errors, how will the student ever realize they are being made? Hence, it could be argued that the flaw in activities promoting ‘free conversation’ is that they encourage students to feel satisfied with communication at all costs, thus depriving them of a reason to push on to higher levels of language competence. In a study of a Japanese immigrant to Hawaii, for example, Schmidt (1983; in Thornbury and Slade 2006) found that, although the subject’s conversational skills had, in a sense, deepened during his first three years in the country, his grammatical knowledge remained at the same level. He produced spoken English reminiscent of the Dickensian character Alfred Jingle, with no articles, occasional lack of verbs, redundant subject pronouns, and so on; which is, as Thornbury and Slade (2006: 215) observe, ‘successful communication’, but at the same time evidence of ‘fairly unsophisticated interlanguage grammar’.

In the more polished ‘conversation’ that emerged from the second cycle of lessons, these issues were addressed to some extent, in that the students were able to correct any errors for the final recording. However, it must also be admitted that this final product is a long way from being a sample of the spontaneous conversation which the study had hoped to promote. It remains to be seen whether, in the course of this ongoing A/R project, such errors will eventually disappear from Roberto’s spontaneous conversation, for example.

Conclusion

As Jane Willis writes: ‘Can we realistically expect our learners to shed their inhibitions and take part in real-time conversations in the target language, without having had experience of them?’ (Willis 1996: 18). Such observations represent the pedagogical justification of the work presented in this paper. The desire has been to provide the learners with opportunities to produce utterances that are, in McDonough’s words ‘genuinely communicative’, that are ‘desire- and purpose-driven’, and that ‘express ideas and opinions’ (McDonough et al 2013: 157). I have made a distinction, in this paper, between the kind of activities that are used in TESOL to promote ‘Speaking’ generally, and the phenomenon of actual ‘Conversation’. Though excellent, in their place, I somehow found myself reluctant to propose TESOL speaking activities for use with this particular group. Their levels of motivation were high throughout, and they really wanted to talk about their musical interests. I am not sure they would have appreciated a diet of language games, role plays and simulations to the same extent.

As I said above, with the benefit of hindsight, it might have been better to make more use of techniques for developing conversational micro-skills before plunging into conversation. Some of the pedagogical activities described in Thornbury and Slade (2006), for example, would have been excellent first steps towards achieving higher levels of conversational competence. Reflection on the first cycle brought to mind Krashen’s cautions about the possible harmful effects of too-early performance (Krashen 1981: 67). Others have argued that ‘early free speaking’ may produce ‘linguistic monstrosities’ (see Schmidt and Frota 1986: 291). In this category I would tentatively place Roberto’s habit of saying ‘not is’, described above. The activity described in this paper had no impact on such features of the students’ interlanguage, as it had none on their mastery of conversational micro-skills such as fillers, back-channelling, interruptions, more general mechanisms of turn-taking, etc. Nor did it improve their pronunciation.

Nevertheless, I do feel that the study described here has a contribution to offer, at the very least in terms of stimulating debate over its core issues. Fundamentally, I believe that language learners wish to use their language to speak, to express themselves in L2, with the same correspondence of thought and word as they do in their L1. The kind of oral activities found in TESOL classes the world over are all very well, and provide many benefits to the students’ oral skills. But it is still an open question how far these activities, over time, build up to produce genuine communicative competence. Everyday conversation sometimes appears to be the simplest, the most natural form of all language use. And yet, paradoxically, it may be the hardest skill to learn.

References

Altrichter, H, Posch, P. and Somekh, B. (1993). Teachers Investigate Their Work. London and New York: Routledge.

Bygate, M. (1987). Speaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burns, A. (1999). Collaborative Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Burns, A. (2010). Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching: A Guide for Practitioners. London and New York: Routledge.

Cazden, C. B. (2011). Dell Hymes's Construct of “Communicative Competence”. Anthropology and Education Quarterly (42): 4, pp. 364-369: Wiley.

Chiari, G. (2003). Co-operative Learning in Italian schools: Learning and Democracy. Quaderno n. 30: Quaderni of the Department of Sociology and Social Research, Trento: Università degli Studi di Trento.

Cook, G. (1989). Discourse. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Cook, V. (2001). Second Language Learning and Language Teaching. Malta: Hodder Education.

Corder, S. P. (1994). A Role for the Mother Tongue. In Gass, Susan M., Selinker, Larry (eds) Language Transfer in Language Learning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ernst, G. (1994). "Talking Circle": Conversation and Negotiation in the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 1994, pp. 293-322.

Faerch, C. and Kasper, G. (1983). Strategies in Interlanguage Communication. New York: Longman.

Gardner-Chloros, P. (2009). Code-switching: an Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). Spoken and Written Language. Geelong, Vic: Deakin University Press.

Harmer, J. (2007). The Practise of English Language Teaching: 4th edition. Harlow: Longman.

Harris, B. (2014). Creating a Classroom Culture That Supports the Common Core. Teaching Questioning, Conversation Techniques, and Other Essential Skills. London and New York: Routledge.

Hymes, D. H. (1966). Two types of linguistic relativity. In Bright, W. (ed) Sociolinguistics. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 114–158.

Keller, E. and Warner, S.T. (1988). Conversation Gambits: Real English Conversation Practices. Hove: Language Teaching Publications.

Krashen, S. (1981). Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

McDonough, S. (1995). Strategy and Skill in Learning a Foreign Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995.

McDonough, J. and Shaw, C. (1993). Teaching Language Skills. Cambridge: Blackwell.

McDonough J. Shaw, C. and Masuhara, H. (2013). Materials and Methods in ELT: a Teacher’s Guide. Chichester, Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Nunan, D. (2003). Practical English Language Teaching. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Nattinger, J.R. (1988). Some Current Trends in Vocabulary Teaching. In Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (eds) Vocabulary and Language Teaching. New York: Longman, pp. 62-82.

Nunan, D. (2004). Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nunan, D. (2013). Learner-Centered English Language Education. The Selected Works of David Nunan. London and New York: Routledge.

Peräkylä A., Antaki, C. and Vehviläinen, S. (eds) (2008). Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J. C. and Rodgers, T.S. (2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, K. and Seedhouse, P. (eds) (2005). Applying Conversation Analysis. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation (1968–1972), Volumes I and II. Gail Jefferson (ed.). Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.

Schegloff, E. (1996). Turn Organization: On the Intersection of Grammar and Interaction. In Ochs, E., Schegloff, E. and Thompson, S. (eds) Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 52–133.

Schmidt, R. W. (1983). Interaction, Acculturation and the Acquisition of Communicative Competence. In Wolfson, N. and Judd, E. (eds.) Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, pp. 137-174.

Schmidt, R.W. and Frota, S.N. (1986). Developing Basic Conversational Ability in a Second Language: a Case Study of an Adult Learner of Portuguese. In Day, R.R. (ed) Talking to Learn: Conversation in Second Language Acquisition, pp. 237-326. Rowley: Newbury House.

Schneider, P. H. (1993). Developing Fluency with Pair Taping. JALT Journal, 15(1), pp. 55-62.

Sinclair, J. and Coulthard, M. (1975). Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Skehan, P. (1996). Second Language Acquisition Research and Task-Based Instruction. In Willis, J. and Willis, D. (eds) Challenge and Change in Language Teaching. Oxford: Macmillan Heinemann, pp. 17-31.

Staab, C. (1992). Oral Language for Today's Classroom. Markham: Pippin Publishing.

Stevick, E.W. (1963). A Workbook in Language Teaching. With Special Reference to English as a Foreign Language. New York: Abingdon.

Stevick, E.W. (1989). Success with Foreign Languages: Seven who Achieved it and what Worked for them. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall International.

Tannen, D. (2005). Conversational Style. Analyzing Talk among Friends (New Edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thornbury, S. (2005). How to Teach Speaking. Harlow: Longman.

Thornbury, S. and Slade, D. (2006). Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy. Cambridge: CUP.

Ulichny, P. (1996). Performed Conversations in an ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 739-764.

Washburn, N. and Christianson, K. (1995). Teaching Conversation Strategies Through Pair-Taping. TESL Reporter, 28(2), pp. 41-52.

Willis, J. (1996). A Framework for Task-Based Learning. Harlow: Longman.

Willis, J. (1981). Teaching English through English. A Course in Classroom Language and Techniques. Harlow: Longman.

Appendix A: Group description

Appendix B: Questionnaire

The teacher would like to know your opinions on some points, with the aim of improving the lessons.

1. Do you like these lessons, are you happy to do them? Why? Why not? How could they be improved?
2. What are the most pleasant subjects for discussion - football, music, life, friends, your town… etc?
3. Should we do more, in your opinion: grammar, listening, language games, reading, writing, discussion….etc.
4. When you want to say something in English, what do you do:
   1. I open my mouth and start talking;
   2. I think carefully about what I want to say;
   3. I start speaking in English but then I get blocked when I don’t know a word
5. When you can’t think of something in English, what do you do?
   1. I try to think of a synonym;
   2. I ask the teacher or another student for the translation;
   3. I say what I wanted to say in Italian.
6. Which of these methods is the best, in your opinion?

Appendix C: Transcripts

1.
T: We’re crazy?
R: Yes and you are crazy you don’t have er have not religion and er it em true - sei pazzo come puoi avere religione?
T: I see okay so this all seeing eye for you is what truth in general, truth?
R: L’occhio, cioè..
T: What is it truth in some abstract sense?
R: L’occhio giusto, fuori della pazzia
T: Out of the madness
A: Non è che si riferisce a God, no?

2.
G: The farther part of this song, No-one but me fino..
T: Can save myself
G: Until ‘existed’
T: Yes
G: And all this part or I have listened before
T: You’ve heard it before
G: Or I.. or it’s a part copiata
T: Copied
G: Copied from Black Sabbath

3.
T: But what do you think of this I mean do you like these words Roberto, do you think these are nice words, do you like these words?
R: This song?
T: Yes
R: Yes
T: Why?
R: But it’s very very..very short
T: Ah it’s a short song isn’t it, but maybe there are a lot of guitar solos and things we don’t know
R: Si ripeterà un po’..
T: Yeah probably, probably, probably
R: And er this song is er is er is er.. (inaud.) very very different to Iron Maiden because and first few albums there is another..
T: Ah, another singer?
R: Yes
T: Ah I didn’t know that
R: Paul (inaud.)

4.
T: Antonio’s absorbed in it. What do you think Antonio, do you like the song? Do you like the words?
A: The lyrics?
T: Yeah
A: The song non penso the lyrics is good. Very good.
T: Hm. Why?
A: Because it’s tutto, tutto una cosa di propria is, er come Stairway to Heaven
T: Ah er ah the idea of Stairway to Heaven is the same idea
A: Cioè No, in sense il senso della canzone is a programme for the..dello scrittore..
T: Programme for..
A: Il Programme er Il senso della canzone sa solo lo scrittore
T: Meaning..the meaning of the song
A: The meaning of, yes
T: Ah only the writer
A: And it’s difficult pensare a cio che pensa che ha pensato (inaud.)
T: Ah okay so it’s difficult for you to understand his idea.

5. A: I don’t think that Led Zeppelin is satanic..secondo me..pero pero
T: Rolling stones yes, rolling stones
A: For me is..in Stairway to Heaven for me è la perfezione della canzone the perfect
T: Perfect
A: Una canzone che letto in un senso è un inno alla madonna, letto in un altro è un inno a satana è una cosa geniale..
T: Genius

Please check the Methodology & Language for Secondary course at Pilgrims website.