While written exercises may serve students adequately on tests, the structures they emphasize can remain elusive or difficult for students to master in conversation. Students tend to interpret their difficulty in applying what they have learned as a lack of language ability, and they can quickly lose confidence when speaking. Producing a target…

Communicative Language Teaching, popularly known as CLT, has become a newly adopted methodology in the teaching and learning context of Bangladesh. This methodology, since the initiation, has encountered and is still encountering a number of hurdles that need to be dealt with best care and feasible strategy. Of all methods, most of the educational…

Believes current audiolingual approach to foreign language teaching lacks opportunities for spontaneous speech. Author shows why this is and offers suggestions such as oral exercises and games to compensate. (Author/BK)

This approach utilizes a communications model, individual and group problem-solving activities and class discussion for mastering communication skills. Understanding communications principles and feeling secure in the classroom are essential. Students also deliver short informative and demonstration talks to prepare them for content area class…

Describes an activity for use in the conversational English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. The activity involves having each student say one or two sentences that continues a story being made up as the activity goes along. Students were positive about the activity, because saying only one or two sentences helped them not to feel pressured or…

Six exercises intended to promote conversation skills are presented, including five survival games situated in space, caves, the middle of the ocean, the Sahara desert, and the North Pole; and a game to select a prison parolee from a group of candidates. The games involve role playing and decision-making activities. (MSE)

Describes a "preliminary" course for English as a foreign language in Grades 5-6, including games and situational conversations. An outline is given, ordered on the basis of increasing difficulty. Hints are given for extending the repertoire of games. Finally, the value of written texts is discussed. (IFA/WGA)

Reasons for Indonesian students' reluctance to practice English are discussed, including absence of classroom follow-up activities. Some teaching/learning principles are noted, followed by some conversation teaching techniques (e.g., using humor, rhymes/songs, and interviews). (Contains 10 references.) (LB)

Analyzes the importance of conversational gambits and routines in achieving second language communicative competence and then presents a model which uses telephone conversations as a means of achieving this goal. Exercises for drilling and testing gambits and routines are also presented. (Author/CB)

A technique using dialogues and realistic prose passages from the works of Georges Simenon and Simone de Beauvoir to teach French conversational skills at the college level is explained and illustrated. (MSE)

Describes the development and use of a video module for an intensive conversational Portuguese class for graduate business students. Tips are given for successful classroom use of off-air videocassette recordings. (LMO)

Presents an approach for developing oral proficiency in the advanced conversation course that proposes, as an organizing principle, the use of Swales's concept of genre as a class of communicative events that share a communicative purpose. It is concluded that focus on genre can improve proficiency performance and articulation. (eight references)…

Data are presented to illustrate how confirmation and comprehension checks and clarification requests develops second-language skills (comprehension and production). Absence of these interactional features in the classroom reflects the unequal participant relationships which are shaped by classroom activities. Two activities (in appendix) were…

Examines problems with improving oral language skills of limited-English-speaking adults and describes a university English as a second language course that is organized around issues in the women's movement. Topics are selected by the students, and a variety of approaches are used. A lesson plan and evaluative remarks are included. (AMH)

The comic book is discussed as an aid to improving English conversational ability in preadolescents and teenagers. A description of some of the characteristics of conversational English, such as contractions, stereotyped phrases, and conversational fillers, should precede the presentation of data from comic books. Classroom techniques suggested…