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The book reports on research into teaching conversation strategies as a means of developing communicative competence. The introductory chapter defines key terms and positions this book's aims and arguments. The next four chapters each describe a different study examining the teaching of conversation strategies in a different way: a learner corpus investigation of strategies used by both learners and users of English as a lingua franca; a materials evaluation study based on the responses of teachers in a variety of contexts; an experimental study in an ESL context, comparing the effects of teaching conversation strategies to a control group receiving no instruction; and finally a qualitative diary and interview study in an EFL context. The author concludes by discussing the implications of these studies for teachers and researchers.
About the author
Christian Jones has been involved in English language teaching for over twenty five years and has worked in China, Japan, Thailand and the UK. During this time, he taught general English, business English, exam classes, classes for young learners and undertook materials/course development and teacher training. He holds the Cambridge CTEFLA and DTEFLA qualifications alongside an MA and PhD from the University of Nottingham.Chris' main research interests are related to spoken language and include work on spoken corpora, lexis and lexico-grammar, classroom applications of corpus data and instructed second language acquisition in general.He is currently academic lead for postgraduate taught programmes in the School of the Arts and the University of Liverpool in the UK.
