Effective Techniques For English Conversation Groups [antikvár]

The conversation class has long been the stepchild in programs ofEnglish for non-native speakers. Students invariably request such anactivity, and so a class is hastily and haphazardly scheduled andassigned to the most willing member of the staff who, more oftenthan not, is also the least experienced. Despite the expenditure ofmuch energy and enthusiasm by all concerned, the conversation classjust doesn't come off; it doesn't achieve its objective. The learners,even those at fairly advanced levels, simply do not conversespontaneously.Many reasons have been advanced for this failure to bridge thegap, to progress from classroom exercises to real communication.This is not the place to review the arguments for and againstparticular pedagogical theories. More important than placing theblame, it seems to me, is to suggest a remedy. Recent studies oflanguage acquisition have uncovered the fact that hypothesistestingwhat we used to call trial and erroris an essential ingredientof the language learning process. This suggests that we must provideour students with opportunities to use their knowledge of the targetlanguage, however scanty, in creative ways, from the very beginningof their study.Our textbooks have not yet caught up with this new knowledge.Until they do, teachers will have to look in other places for help inplanning ways to motivate their students to use language creatively.Julia Dobson has done the profession a great service by gatheringthe ideas and practices of many of our most talented teachers ofEnglish, together with her own original material, to form thiswell-organized synthesis which will serve as a ready reference forthe leader of the conversation group, or for the forward-lookingteacher who wishes to introduce some conversation into the dailylesson. Her chief assignment during ten years as a TEFLer in Europe,Asia, Africa, and South America has been to find better ways ofgetting the job done. This manual is evidence of her enthusiastic anddiligent accomplishment of that task. It will be welcomed not onlyby the untrained volunteer but also by the professional teacher ofEnglish as a second or foreign language.Jean Praninskas