Conversational Grammar Research Articles

Formation of the ability to listen in English

The article is devoted to the formation of listening skills among students learning a foreign language. In addition, the article deals with the problem of formation of listening skills stages and ways of formation of these skills using short popular science texts selected taking into account engineering specialties. Special attention is paid to the methods of working with students with multi-level formation of listening skills in general, and in the professional field in particular. Recommendations are presented for the use of educational audio materials in the independent work of students, including using an electronic educational environment, as well as the principles of selection of audio texts and the principles of the organization of educational material in general. The article also defines a new method for teaching listening, identifies goals and objectives, mechanisms of listening. The role of listening in the process of mastering a foreign language as a means of communication is emphasized, arguments are given in favor of the constant expansion of vocabulary and the study of conversational grammar, some recommendations are given on the organization of practical listening classes in the student audience.

The first Portuguese Textbooks of the German Language, based on the Method Gaspey-Otto-Sauer

In addition to other works designed to support the acquisition of modern foreign languages from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the so-called 'conversation grammars' and 'elementary grammars' of the Heidelberg Julius Groos Verlag occupy a central position in the teaching concept of this publishing house, which is still referred to today as the Method Gaspey-Otto-Sauer (MGOS). This paper explores the relationship between a contemporary edition of the French language conversation grammar Nouvelle grammaire allemande (1882) and the first edition of the Portuguese language Nova grammatica allemã theorica e pratica (1887), as well as the elementary grammars Petite grammaire allemande (1881) and Grammatica elementar allemã: adaptada á lingua portugueza (1887). In particular, this paper examines how the editor or author José Prévôt (fl. 1887) proceeded in preparing the editions for which he ultimately assumed responsibility

Material Critique for Touchstone 3rd Edition: on corpus analysis and spoken grammar

This paper analysed the use of corpus and spoken language features in the English Language Teaching (ELT) coursebook “Touchstone”. The corpus analysis was carried out by using the British National Corpus (BNC) which was chosen for its easy and free access. In doing the spoken language analysis, I refer to McCarthy and Carter’s (2015, p.5) argument which take the grammar of conversation as ‘the benchmark for a grammar of speaking’ by considering features such as ellipsis, heads and teailsm lexical bundles, and vagueness. The analysis indicated that the language used in this coursebook signified a certain level of authentic and natural language, although areas of improvement were also found.

The importance of the ‘method Gaspey-Otto-Sauer’ amongst the earliest Portuguese textbooks of the German language

ABSTRACT The present paper explores the role of a grammar-translation based teaching concept known in English as ‘Method Gaspey-Otto-Sauer’ (MGOS) amongst the first textbooks of the German language, published for a specifically Portuguese target audience between 1863 and 1926. Given that the underlying teaching concept by means of ‘conversation grammars’, ‘elementary grammars’ and auxiliary works was put forth as the exclusive product of the ‘Julius Groos Verlag’ in Heidelberg, the most essential information on the publishing house is summarized, as well as on the three authors Thomas William Gaspey (1819–1872), Emil Otto (1813–1878) and Karl Marquard Sauer (1827–1896), to whom the MGOS owes its name. Following a brief presentation of the very first German textbooks for Portuguese learners, the paper focuses on the editions of the ‘conversation grammar’ and the ‘elementary grammars’ of German and their importance in the above context of a corpus of German textbooks for Portuguese learners.

Grammar of Conversation and Its Role in Teaching English Language at Tertiary Level in Bangladeshi Context

In Bangladesh, English Language Teaching shifted from traditional Grammar Translation approach towards Communicative Language Teaching approach. Although in CLT approach all language skills should be treated equally, we still do not give emphasis to all four skills. Speaking skill should be highlighted for learners at tertiary level in order to improve communicative competence in learning English language. This article tries to focus on the differences between the grammar of conversation and the written language. Then, it presents some features of grammar of conversation and discusses that if learners can effectively use the features of grammar of conversation, they can develop their proficiency in English language. In this research a study has been conducted through questionnaire survey with teachers and the results have been analyzed while some suggestions have been made on the basis of the results.

PENGAJARAN MEMBACA DAN MENULIS BAGI PESERTA DIDIK TUNARUNGU

Reading and writing skills is coverage of more complex language skills of listening and speaking skills. We need the best approach in developing the literacy skills of children with hearing impairment. In some studies that focus on accuracy syntax hearing impaired children, it was found that they tend to use many of the same phrases over and over again in simple sentences, a little more complex sentences, and make lots of small mistakes in the use of sentence structure, word number, the use of pronouns and said pointer, and so on. This paper discusses several options approach in teaching reading and writing skills of deaf children, namely (1) conversations from heart to heart (perdati), (2) read ideovisual (percami), (3) read receptive, (4) the exercise of reflective, and (5) conversation or conversations linguistic grammar or also called reflective conversation grammar.

Teacher-as-Researcher Paradigm for Sign Language Teachers: Toward Evidence-Based Pedagogies for Improved Learner Outcomes

In the teaching of sign languages as foreign languages (FLs), teachers instruct learners in vocabulary and conversational grammar. In doing so they frequently notice that some learners are able to learn and produce vocabulary and use correct grammar, whereas others struggle. For a better understanding of learners’ learning processes and their own pedagogical approaches, FL teachers turn to research studies on the teaching and learning of FLs. However, those studies are often largely inapplicable to their in-classroom practices. To resolve this problem, this article proposes and explicates teacher-as-researcher as a research paradigm for teachers’ pedagogical development to bring about improved learner outcomes.

World Cultural Stage and Retranslation of Local Tradition

Culture may transgress geopolitical boundaries. these days, especially when the survival of a certain community is under the threat of global political power, the need to overemphasize cultural uniqueness arises more strongly. Tradition is ambiguous and multi-interpretable, depending on the frame of interpretation, interest, power, and above all, on the dialectical encounter of ‘translation’: only in relation with something other and different, particular aspect of the tradition comes up. More than simply a matter of ‘transmission’, tradition is in fact a process of on-going ‘transformation’ and ‘reinterpretation’. The world becames a huge stage where multiple waves of existence intersect and realize the complexity, ambiguity and subtlety of each other’s world and of their own. In the interaction self-interrogation and mutual self-criticism take place, in which the participating cultures are called into question. In such global stage, cultures would weave and reweave their conceptual networks continually. The world cultural stage today is a never-ending conversation where traditions are not only rearticulated thereby, but also reinvented, and extended to their unpredictable potentialities in terms of new contexts. Culture lives in the conjunctions of our grammar of conversation happening on the stage.<br /><br />

Spoken Grammar: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?

AbstractThis article synthesises progress made in the description of spoken (especially conversational) grammar over the 20 years since the authors published a paper in this journal arguing for a re-thinking of grammatical description and pedagogy based on spoken corpus evidence. We begin with a glance back at the 16th century and the teaching of Latin grammar in England, with its emphasis on speaking the target language. Later grammars were dominated by written standards, a situation that persisted till the 20th century, when recording technology and spoken corpora enabled new insights into the grammar of everyday speaking. We highlight those insights which especially challenge grammars derived only or mainly from written sources. We evidence the view that conversational grammar is non-sentence-based, co-constructed and highly interactive, and that it poses questions concerning metalanguage. We briefly review debates concerning spoken grammar and ELT/ESL pedagogy. We then consider 21st-century Internet technologies and e-communication, and implications for the spoken/written grammar distinction, arguing that description and pedagogy may need to undergo further re-thinking in light of the multi-modality which characterises e-language.

Conversational sequences and dialogue grammar in Kam

Conversational sequences and dialogue grammar in Kam

Association Reply Method for Intelligent Conversation Processing

This paper proposes a response autonomous production method on chatting system for intelligence conversation. An autonomous response method needs some rules for fixed pattern talking and application ability for new expression. A response must make autonomously based on understanding of natural language sentence. So, it needs a mechanism of humanistic association and amphiboly based on grammar and rule of conversation. This paper explains a mechanism of concept association and commonsense judgement and proposes a association response method based on commonsense using the mechanism that is unrealizable only with statistical processing. The proposed response method are place association method, adjective association method and change topic association method based on place information getting from conversation situation. And then there was able to achieve an accuracy of 80%, 74% and 71%.

ANALYSING THE GRAMMAR OF CASUAL CONVERSATION: ENACTING ROLE RELATIONS

This article offers an overview of the conversation analysis (CA) method and its theoretical and practical applications for qualitative social scientific research. The article also discusses the method's analytical contributions and methodological applications based on the grammar of casual conversation offered by Eggins and Slade (1997). For illustration, analyses of data fragments are presented, using English language from telephone conversation recorded from one of radio programs. The recorded conversation was taken from the English Program at RCT FM radio on Sunday. The analyses try to describe and explain how language enables us to initiate and sustain casual talk. The article highlights CA's unique insights into the way social processes, relations, and identities are constructed and experienced at the level of everyday interaction, and draws attention to some of the ways in which the method can be of benefit to social scientists from a variety of disciplines. Key words:

Well I’m not sure I think… The use of well by non-native speakers

Pragmatic markers are an important part of the grammar of conversation and not simply markers of disfluency. They have a number of functions that help the speaker to organise the conversation and to express feelings and attitudes. Advanced EFL learners use frequent pragmatic markers such as well. However their use of well diverges from the native speaker norm. The present study uses data from the Swedish component of the LINDSEI corpus and its native speaker counterpart (LOCNEC) to examine similarities and differences between native and non-native speakers. The overall picture is that Swedish learners overuse well, although there are considerable individual differences. Thus learners use well above all as a fluency device to cope with speech management problems but underuse it for attitudinal purposes. Pragmatic markers cannot be taught in the same way as other lexical items but it is important to discuss how and where they are used.

Redesigning therapy for agrammatism: Initial findings from the ongoing evaluation of a conversation-based intervention study

Therapy for agrammatism, once only targeted at surface grammar, has begun to demonstrate the benefits of rigorous theoretically motivated therapy aimed at underlying syntax. Whilst there is evidence that grammatical ability in the clinical setting can be improved by such therapies, it has proved hard to detect carryover to everyday conversation in the home. Recent research using a qualitative methodology called Conversation Analysis (CA) has shown that utterances produced by agrammatic speakers in peer conversation differ significantly from those elicited during assessment and therapy tasks. This is because tasks target decontextualized language, isolated from an interactional context of real-life talk about needs, opinions, and experiences. This paper explores the idea that, given this finding, it may be more appropriate, and effective, to provide therapy for agrammatism by targeting the grammar of conversation directly. It outlines a new therapeutic approach based on CA concepts, describes the early development of a valid quantitative measure of change in conversation and presents some qualitative data from one of the first dyads involved in an ongoing therapy study.

Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study

One area in language and gender research that has so far received only little attention is the extent to which the sexes make use of what recent corpus research has termed “conversational grammar.” The author’s initial findings have suggested that the majority of features distinctive of conversational grammar may be used predominantly by female speakers. This article reports on a study designed to test the hypothesis that conversational grammar is “feminine grammar” in the sense that women’s conversational language is more adapted to the conversational situation than men’s. Based on data from the conversational subcorpus of the British National Corpus and following the situational framework for the description of conversational features elaborated in the author’s previous research, features distinctive of conversational grammar are grouped into five functional categories and their normed frequencies compared across the sexes. The functional categories distinguish features that can be seen as adaptations to constraints set by the situational factors of (1) Shared Context, (2) Co-Construction, (3) Real-Time Processing, (4) Discourse Management, and (5) Relation Management. The study’s results, described in detail in relation to the biological category of speaker sex and cultural notions of gender, suggest that the feminine grammar hypothesis is valid.

A preliminary evaluation of Fast ForWord-Language as an adjuvant treatment in language intervention.

Fast ForWord-Language (FFW-L) is designed to enhance children's processing of auditory-verbal signals and, thus, their ability to learn language. As a preliminary evaluation of this claim, we examined the effects of a 5-week course of FFW-L as an adjuvant treatment with a subsequent 5-week conventional narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) that targeted narrative comprehension and production and grammatical output. Twenty-three children 6-8 years of age with language impairments were assigned randomly to 1 of 3 intervention sequences: (a) FFW-L/NBLI, (b) NBLI/FFW-L, or (c) wait/NBLI. We predicted that after both treatment periods, the FFW-L/NBLI group would show greater gains on measures of narrative ability, conversational grammar, and nonword repetition than the other groups. After the first 5-week study period, the intervention groups, taken together (i.e., FFW-L/NBLI and NBLI/FFW-L), significantly outperformed the no-treatment wait/NBLI group on 2 narrative measures. At the final test period, all 3 groups displayed significant time-related effects on measures of narrative ability, but there were no statistically significant between-groups effects of intervention sequence. This preliminary study provides no evidence to support the claim that FFW-L enhances children's response to a conventional language intervention.

The lexicogrammatical reflection of interpersonal relationship in conversation

This article reports an attempt to investigate, apart from the semantics and the pragmatics, how much the lexis and the grammar of a conversation can help extract interpersonal information about the interlocutors' orientations towards each other. The discourse analysed was extracted from a scene in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code and its motion picture adaptation. The adaptation of this scene is similar to the novel original in terms of the characters' content of discussion and only differs in the orientation of the characters to one another. The analysis focuses on the determination of response types, which are generally classified as either expected or discretionary, and contribute to the realization of positive and negative orientations respectively. The distribution of different types of response is visualized as the interlocutor's `response profile', which helps in the realization of his/her orientation to the one to whom he/she is responding.

Modelling dialogue as inter-action

In this paper we introduce a formal model of dialogue based on grammar systems theory: Conversational Grammar Systems (CGS). The model takes into account ideas from the study of human-human dialogue in order to define a flexible mechanism for coherent dialogues that may help in the design of effective and user-friendly computer dialogue systems. The main feature of the model is to present an action view of dialogue. CGS model dialogue as an inter-action, this is a sequence of acts performed by two or more agents in a common environment. We claim that CGS are able to model dialogue with a high degree of flexibility, which means that they are able to accept new concepts and modify rules, protocols and settings during the computation.

A Register Approach to Teaching Conversation: Farewell to Standard English?

Owing to analyses of large spoken corpora the linguistic knowledge of conversation has grown in recent years exponentially. Up until now little of this knowledge has trickled down to the EFL classroom. One of the reasons, this paper argues, is the failure in the relevant literature to spell out clearly how teaching conversational grammar affects the role of what is the major variety in the EFL classroom, Standard English (SE). My aim in this paper is threefold. First, I briefly discuss some neglected conversational features in relation to SE, concluding that the contrast between the grammars of conversation and SE is so stark that the notion of SE is problematic in talking of the spoken language. Second, I consider what this contrast implies for EFL teaching, arguing that for authentic conversation to be taught effectively it is necessary to reduce the role of SE to ‘a core variety’ that has its place in teaching writing while conversational grammar might serve as the underlying model in teaching speech. I argue that such a redefinition of SE would best be implemented in a ‘register approach’ which shifts the emphasis from a monolithic view of language to a register-sensitive view thus acknowledging the fundamental functional diversity of language use. Third, I discuss some important issues arising from this approach and, finally, outline what may be gained by it.

Rethinking agrammatism: Factors affecting the form of language elicited via clinical test procedures

Current approaches to assessing agrammatism use data from restricted contexts, such as picture description and story telling tasks. There is evidence in the conversation analysis literature to suggest that conversational grammar may differ markedly from the grammar of such elicited language samples. The disparity between conversational and test grammar suggests that it is possible for the form of an agrammatic utterance to be motivated by the context in which it occurs. Thus, behaviours previously considered to be symptoms of agrammatism may be adaptations to talking in different environments. This study analyses two distinctive test response forms made by two agrammatic speakers, and discusses whether they might be strategic adaptations to testing rather than symptoms of impairment.