Teaching how to do being a competent participant in interaction: Using conversational corpora in the foreign language classroom

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Abstract Summary

Submission ID :

AILA991

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[SYMP65] Research on Romance Languages and Social Interaction: Conversation Analytic Studies and Applied Linguistics Perspectives

Argument :

This study aims to offer a model of use of publicly available spoken language corpora (Italian and French) for pedagogical purposes, focusing on the use of discourse markers (DMs) in interaction. The ultimate goal is to foster the development of learners' interactional competence (cf. Markee 2019) by exposing them to natural occurring data. Several studies have highlighted how spoken language as it is featured in audio and video materials for foreign language teaching differs significantly from spontaneous talk (Wong 2002). In such a context, even DMs are uncommon and rarely analyzed in teaching materials. DMs are primordial resources for social action which participants also rely on in order to enact and negotiate relationships with other participants. Being able to use DMs consistently should therefore be an integral part of the L2 user's interactional competence. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to teach how to use these resources in the absence of a natural input. We will show how valuable teaching materials for the L2 classroom can be created by relying on publicly available language corpora (French: corpus FLEURON, André 2016; corpus CLAPI-FLE, Ravazzolo et al., 2015; Italian: corpus KIParla, Ballarè & Mauri 2021). The examples cover some conversational uses of the DMs "be'" in Italian (Pauletto 2017) and "ben" in French (Bruxelles & Traverso 2001). The ultimate goal is to offer teachers a model in which the focus is not so much on the properties of some discrete linguistic items, as on the specific interactional context and sequential position where talk-as-action is produced. From a methodological viewpoint, we engage in a dialogue between different perspectives in applied linguistics, starting from the use of naturally occurring conversational data in the classroom and aiming at effective teaching of interactional skills.

References

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