Recent research has given us interesting insights into many aspects of how we communicate. Based on research from the Cambridge International Corpus of North American Spoken English, presenters Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford, authors of the Touchstone series, consider a range of topics in this presentation, including:
- What conversation strategies are and the kinds of strategies speakers use to manage conversations, for example, ways to show or check understanding, to start and end conversations, or to involve other speakers in a conversation etc.
- Why we need to teach these kinds of strategies to our students and how they can contribute to fluency in English
- Some important pointers when teaching these strategies in the classroom.
Jeanne and Helen also demonstrate examples of useful strategies to teach, and helpful useful activities to leave you with the confidence to start teaching conversation strategies to your students.
Jeanne McCarten taught English in Sweden, France, Malaysia and UK before becoming an ELT writer, and is interested in applying insights from corpus research to language teaching.
Helen Sandiford has extensive teacher and teacher training experience, having spent nine years in Japan setting up English programs, and teaching in Japanese senior high schools and vocational colleges.