Focuses on communicative language-teaching (CLT), which holds that language-learning is learning to communicate and that it encourages students to communicate from the beginning. CLT creates communicative needs by implementing task-based activities in the classroom, e.g., self-introductions, obtaining information, and social small talk. (eight…

Investigated the types of reception strategies and the frequency of their use by students of French as a second language at different levels of language proficiency, measured by an oral proficiency interview. A number of distinct strategies were identified: kinesics, global reprises, hypothesis testing in English and uptaking. Results are…

This report describes a "culturally contexted" conversation analysis approach to the study of naturally occurring speech in supervisory conferences. The supervisors and teachers were participants in a graduate program for beginning teachers, and the conference's purpose was supervisory evaluation of teachers' classroom performances. Ethnographic…

Thirteen years after the first edition of this book, significant changes in social and intellectual life have made the subject of classroom discourse more important than ever, and this new edition integrates current perspectives and research. New features in the book include: a new rationale for the importance of student-teacher talk (the…

Investigates, within the context of the question-answer framework of a foreign language oral proficiency test, the interactive nature of spoken discourse between Canadian students and assessors when there is trouble in talk as perceived by the assessors, with a focus on how they accommodate to the students. The study has implications for rater…