Within the communicative language teaching approach, current instructional materials often lack explicit guidance or fail to provide L2 learners with a wide range of resources in the target language. Conversation analysis (CA), which focuses on authentic talk, has been proposed as a potential resource for language classrooms. This study examines…

Discusses reaction to miscommunication of a nonnative speaker from Italy residing in France who experiences a lapse in his ability to communicate in French with a native speaker. Notes that this occurrence encourages the pursuit of communicative competence by the nonnative speaker in the target language as well as an effort by both…

A study of non-native children's acquisition of communicative competence examined the child's construction of rules of conversation in the second language. The linguistic devices that children use to link up their utterances with those of another speaker, i.e., cohesion-creating devices that create textual unity, were focused upon. Repetition, one…

Five components of communication competence have been derived from research: affiliation/support, empathy, behavioral flexibility, social relaxation, and interaction management. This paper describes these dimensions of communication competence; it then reports on a study in which two college females judged by their peers to be effective…

This practical book is designed for the classroom teacher of a second or foreign language at any level. The articles are grouped into two distinct but interdependent sections on general considerations and specific techniques. The contents of the first section are as follows: "Moi Tarzan, Vous Jane?: A Study of Communicative Competence" by P.B.…

The Georgetown Round Table on discourse analysis dealt with the following aspects of the topic: Emerson's essay on language; oral remembering and narrative structures; persuasive discourse; social construction of topical cohesion; discourse as an interactional achievement; the place of intonation; topic as the unit of analysis in a criminal law…

The development of the Conversational Unit (CU) was investigated in a semilongitudinal study of three mother/son dyads in nonstructured spontaneous communication. The children were 19 to 23 months old at the start of the investigation. Sound films were recorded monthly during bathing and feeding times. After four months, verbal and nonverbal…

Every speech community has a baby talk register (BT) of phonological, grammatical, and lexical features regarded as primarily appropriate for addressing young children and also for other displaced or extended uses. Much BT is analyzable as derived from normal adult speech (AS) by such simplifying processes as reduction, substitution, assimilation,…

This study of code switching among Puerto Rican children attending a New York City public school focuses primarily upon the correlation between interaction rules, as perceived by the participants, and code switching. Code switching strategies of a seven-year-old boy, an eight-year-old girl, and a 10-year-old girl in the bilingual third grade class…

Six adult students of English as a second language were ranked according to individual input into classroom oral interaction. Four hypotheses were then tested, regarding correlation between degree of input generation on the one hand and achievement and performance on the other. It was found that: (1) high input generators (HIGs) performed better…

Discusses an intermediate-level learner's progress in listening comprehension during a pre-sessional English for Academic Purposes course in the United Kingdom. Highlights the difference in progress in one-way and two-way listening and the discrepancy between performance within the sheltered setting of the language classroom and success in real…

This analysis of Brazilian baby talk (BT) includes data from two sources: elicitations of the use of BT from three mothers, all of whom have university degrees, and observations of adult-child interactions in the home. The data shows Ferguson's modified list of thirty lexical items that frequently have BT forms in various languages and the…

Understanding spontaneous speech is a very difficult task for many foreign students. They must be taught to use all the ethnographic cues available to enable them to predict the likely content of a text. They must predict not only the factual content of spoken language but also the interactional structuring. (Author/CFM)