LECTURE 11. TEACHING DIALOGUE Plan: 1.Teaching Dialogue: 1) Linguistic peculiarities of dialogue 2) Dialogue-structures 3) Three stages in learning a dialogue 2. Conclusion Dialogues involve two or more speakers and can be subdivided into those exchanges that promote social relationships (interpersonal) and those for which the purpose is to convey prepositional or factual information (transactional). In each case, participants may have a good deal of shared knowledge (background information, schemata); therefore, the familiarity of the interlocutors will produce conversations with more assumptions, implications, and other meanings hidden "between the lines." In conversations between or among participants who are unfamiliar with each other, references and meanings have to be made more explicit in order for effective comprehension to take place. When such references are not explicit, misunderstandings can easily follow.
Linguistic peculiarities of dialogue are as follows:
1. The use of incomplete sentences in responses:
- How many books have you?
- One.
Who has done it?
Nick has.
2. The use of contracted forms: doesn’t, won’t, can’t, isn’t, etc.
3. The use of some abbreviations: lab (laboratory), maths (mathematics) and others.
4. The use of conversational tags. These are the words a speaker uses when he wishes to speak without saying anything. Besides to carry on a conversation pupils need words, phrases to start a conversation, to join it, to confirm, to comment, etc. for example, well, look here, I say …, I’d like to tell you (for starting a talk); you see, you mean, do you mean to say that …, and what about (for joining a conversation); I believe so, I hope, yes, right, quite right, to be sure (for confirming what one says); I think, as far as I know, as far as I can see, the fact is, to tell the truth, I mean to say (for commenting), etc.
There is a great variety of dialogue structures. Here are the principal four:
Question – response.
2. Question –question.
3. Statement –statement.
4. Statement – question.
In teaching dialogue in schools it is necessary to take into account these peculiarities and give pupils pattern dialogues to show what real dialogues look like.
Now let’s speak about the structure of the dialogue. A dialogue consists of a series of lead-response units. The significant feature of a lead-response unit is that the response part may, and usually does, serve in its own turn as a fresh inducement leading to further verbal exchanges, i.e., lead → response → inducement → response. A response unit is a unit of speech between two pauses. It may consist of more than one sentence. But the most characteristic feature of a dialogue is that the lead-response units are closely connected and dependent on each other. The lead is relatively free, while the response depends on the first and does not exist without it.
Where is the book?
There, on the shelf.
In teaching dialogue we should use lead-response units as a teaching point and pattern-dialogues as they involve all features which characterize this form of speech.
To develop pupils’ skills in dialogue on the level of a lead-response unit pupils are taught: