What are Conversation Strategies? They are techniques that help the speaker and listener keep a conversation going to its natural and desired conclusion. They are skills that supplement the linguistic and sociolinguistic skills most texts focus on: grammar, vocabulary, and usage. To develop strategic competence, students must learn the words, phrases, and conventions used as two speakers engage in the active give-and-take of conversation. These are the strategies we use to get more information, make comparisons, correct someone politely, agree and disagree, summarize, share information, and make decisions in a business meeting. Students also practice polite forms, rejoinders, clarifications, follow-up questions, getting a response, expressing probability, interrupting, and avoiding conversation killers. Each activity has three parts: a teacher's introduction, a written introductory exercise to be done by students individually, and pair/group practice that makes us!e of information gap and other interactive formats. -- From product description.

In this long-awaited volume, Regie Routman continues the discussion she began in the best-selling Invitations and further explores the full universe of an effective language arts and literacy program across the curriculum.

Some people worry about participating in social settings because they lack confidence in their conversation skills. They may dread an evening at the pub or even just a chat with one friend, for fear of saying the wrong thing, not being able to think of anything to talk about, or whether they will find themselves feeling generally embarrassed about their conversational technique. This book offers a structure to help with the skills needed for initiating, maintaining, and ending conversations. It looks at casual chat and formal talk with one person face-to-face and on the phone, as well as how to converse in a group. There are over 30 chapters, each dealing with an aspect of conversation such as Greetings How to remember names Being topical, Using humour Reminiscing Repairing conversational gaffs, Escaping! The Conversational Menu Each topic is considered and discussed; exercises are suggested; "homework" is given on credit-card-sized cards, and then the Checklist is filled in, so that learning is secure. This is a complete course on conversation skills. designed for people over 16, either to work with the Speech and Language Therapist, or for some, to work on their own. Alison Roberts is a Speech and Language Therapist whose work has chiefly focused for the last 20 years on the communication needs of 11-25 year-olds with a wide variety of intriguing differences in ability. She works with several brilliant therapists who together form a team called Good Communication. Alison lectures to SLT students and to Careers Advisers and has written several sets of cards and books which have been published by Speechmark Publishing. She is also an enthusiastic craftswoman with an endless need and desire to devise her own SLT games, which gave rise to the original series of articles in the Speech and Language Therapy in Practice magazine.

The activities in this book follow and build upon the strategic conversation skills of the Kehes' book, Conversation Strategies. Discussion Strategies develops discussion skills at high levels of communicative interaction, especially communication in academic settings. Students, in step-by-step procedures, are given extensive practice in a variety of strategies for leading and participating in a discussion. Discussion Strategies provides focused practice with the following discussion techniques: using rejoinders, asking follow-up questions, seeking and giving clarification, using comprehension checks, answering with details, soliciting more details from others, interrupting others during a discussion, recounting something they have heard, volunteering an answer, helping the leader of a discussion, expressing an opinion, referring to a source when giving an opinion, and leading a discussion. Each unit builds on and recycles the previous units. The first twenty-eight units provide controlled practice of the discussion and are for pair groups or triads. Units 29-38 give the students an opportunity to use their new strategies in less structured discussions; they involve large groups or the whole class in open discussion of the articles provided.

What do you do when you need to express the meaning of a word that you don’t know in a foreign language? How do you start and close a conversation, and how do you keep it going? What can you do if you are not sure about what to say in an unfamiliar situation?Communication strategies is a book about the ways and means that users of a second or foreign language can employ when they have to face problems due to gaps in their linguistic, communicative or intercultural competence. Strategies also enable them to deal with uncertainty in personal and intercultural contacts and to increase their autonomy in using languages.Communication strategies is both a handbook for teachers, teacher trainers and educators, providing them with a sound methodological background, and a collection of 30 practice activities, games and tasks for language learners and users. Photocopiable worksheets are provided, as well as freely downloadable recordings of native and non-native speakers of English.

Academic Communication Skills is designed to assist international graduate students as they create their own opportunities to expand their linguistic and strategic repertoires in academic English conversations. The needs of international graduate students are often different than those of others who have learned English as an additional language because they participate in academic conversations at advanced levels, encounter daily opportunities to discuss topics about which they have sophisticated knowledge, and are required to share their expertise with others (in their roles as teaching assistants or research assistants). As students progress in their academic studies, they increasingly understand that their fluency in academic oral communications plays an important role in their academic performance and future career options. While they recognize the importance, many voice frustrations, finding that speaking English is more difficult than writing and engaging in impromptu dialogues is more difficult than presenting prepared monologues. This book is an excellent resource for either classroom instruction or for self-study. It provides effective confidence-building strategies that speakers can try when participating in a range of different academic interactions. By guiding both students and instructors in examining common conversational challenges in academic environments, including many of the assumptions that frequently cause miscommunication, the book provides proven strategies for increased effectiveness and confidence in cross-cultural academic conversations.

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 teac.