Dornyei Zoltan, Thurrell Sarah. Conversation and Dialogues in Action

Prentice Hall, 1992. — 173 p. — ISBN13: 978-0131750357; ISBN10: 0131750356.Offering a variety of exercises and activities that can be used with written and recorded dialogues, this book aims to help teachers to develop their students' conversational abilities. The introduction draws on current discourse analysis to identify skills needing to be taught.
Conversation and Dialogues in Action is in many ways the classic book in the In Action collection: It rediscovers and revitalizes a traditional classroom activity, and structures it for classroom use. Developing conversational skills is very often seen as a filler among other more structured activities in class, partly because we have not seen talking as the structured and rule-governed activity it is. Fortunately, through recent work in discourse analysis and pragmatics, descriptions of everyday conversation now abound, including many that arc drawn from non-native speaker interactions. What we have largely lacked, however, until this exciting contribution to the series from Zoltan Dornyei and Sarah Thurrell is a way in which descriptions can be transformed into classroom tasks in a principled way.