Teaching Casual Conversation: The Issue of Simplification.

This paper focuses on the issue of whether pedagogical mediation will facilitate the acquisition of conversational skills. It argues that it is possible to describe casual conversation, that it has a grammatical structure, and that it is of benefit to English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners for the structure of conversation to be explicitly dealt with. Two central issues surrounding the teaching of casual conversation are (1) whether to simplify the language input or to use authentic data, and (2) whether in fact it is more effective to have no input, but to engage learners in tasks and activities in the classroom that will generate conversation. The paper explores the nature of casual conversation and outlines the differences between classroom discourse and conversational discourse in order to demonstrate that learner-learner interaction, although valuable for other reasons, is not a sufficient basis for the teaching of casual conversation. It is argued that syllabus input should use examples of authentic conversational interaction, with any simplification being in methodology. Suggestions for the teaching of casual conversation are provided. (MDM)