Attitudes to classroom conversation and casual chat have varied over the years. In the heyday of audiolingualism, one writer, Louis Alexander, warned that the traditional conversation lesson is of no value at all if the student is not ready for it. The student must first be trained to use patterns in carefully graded aural-oral drills. Only in this way will he finally learn to speak.The chat stage of the lesson, if it occurred at all, was simply there as a curtain raiser to the main event – the controlled practice of sentence patterns. Until recently, one London language school was still advising its students that the teacher and the student must not chat during the lesson. They must only ask and answer the questions in the book. Chatting is a waste of time. Such a view sits uncomfortably with the finding that conversation, i.e. casual talk that is primarily interpersonal, is by far the most common and the most widespread function of speaking. Moreover, there is a school of thought that argues that, in L1 acquisition, the development of conversational skills precedes the development of language itself. As Evelyn Hatch put it, language learning evolves out oflearning how to carry on conversations, i.e. out of learning how to communicate. By extension, it has been argued that conversation in English as second or foreign language is not the result of language learning, but it is the site where learning occurs. lt is also, of course, a fact that many language learners feel that their most urgent need is to develop conversational competence, and they regularly choose conversation as their principal objective when answering needs analysis surveys. For this reason, many language schools offer conversation classes as a way of complementing more traditional, grammar-focused, classes. However, these offer a challenge to teachers and course designers since it is difficult to plan or programme something as inherently unstructured and spontaneous as casual conversation. As one writer puts it, genuine conversational interactions cannot be the outcome of planned lesson agendas, they have to emerge - and so, by definition, cannot be planned. One way that teachers get round this is to organize conversation classes around a set of themes. Ideally, these should be negotiated with the learners in advance, through the use of a questionnaire or by means of a consensus debate. Themerelated texts can be used to trigger conversation, either in open class or in groups. Or individual students take turns to make a short presentation on the pre-selected topic, which is then followed by open discussion. Pre-planned lesson content can take the form of teaching useful conversational formulas and routines, such as how to open and dose conversations, how to interrupt, change the subject, ask for clarification, and so on.
THORNBURY, Scott. How to Teach Speaking. Cambridge: Longman, 2005, pp. 110-1. (Adapted).
In this excerpt, the author states that “By extension, it has been argued that conversation in English as second or foreign language is not the result of language learning, but it is the site where learning occurs”.
After reading the passage as a whole, choose the best alternative that explains how to cope with this matter.
