7.4. Stages of teaching dialogue

7.4.1. Dialogical unit as an item of teaching

Teaching dialogical speech should be conducted in stages. Mastering a dialogic reply can be considered a preparatory stage in forming dialogic speech habits and skills. According to V.L. Skalkin, students should first acquire the skill of producing responsive replies, i.e. be able to react quickly and adequately with their own replies to the teacher’s or speaker’s initiative reply. Secondly, they should learn producing initiative replies after a pattern given by the teacher or the speaker on tape. The student’s and the teacher’s replies will make up a DU of a certain kind. At this stage, students perform receptive-reproductive and reproductive simulative communicative exercises in imitation, substitution, answering questions, asking for certain information after a pattern, as well as informing. While teaching responsive and initiative replies, it is important to gradually increase the volume of replies from one up to 2 or 3 phrases.

After students have acquired responsive and initiative replies of a certain DU, it is possible to pass on to the first stage of forming dialogic speech habits and skills – mastering certain DUs. A DU is a dialogical speech-teaching item. At this stage, students perform receptive-productive simulative communicative exercises in exchanging replies. Students themselves are the participants of a communicative interchange; the teacher only provides them with a certain communicative task. This task defines the communicative problem to be solved and the roles to be acted by students.

Interconnected chains of DUs where the leading reply is at the same time the dependent reply of the preceding DU and the dependent reply is the leading one of the DU coming after are called a dialogical whole. In methodology, the concept of the dialogical whole is sometimes called a micro dialogue (MD). The MD is considered a means (vehicle) of expressing speakers’ main communicative intentions. Thus, mastering the micro dialogue should be considered the second stage of developing students’ dialogical speech habits and skills.

At the third stage, the students master the skill to construct their own dialogues in accord with the suggested speech situation.

7.4.2. Communicative situations

It should be noted that speech situations (or typical communicative situations, according to V.L. Skalkin) are of paramount importance in teaching dialogical speech. The communicative situation is defined as the people, the place and the purpose of what is being said. In other words, situations mean events in which we list such things as participants and setting, etc. Thus, Jeremy Harmer understands a situation as one of the types of context alongside with the classroom and formulated information. He distinguishes between two major types of situation: 1) a simulated real-life situation and 2) an invented story.

1) According to J. Harmer, simulated real-life situations are particularly important for the introduction of more functional language. Thus, it is important to show who the participants are (whether they are friends or acquaintances, whether one speaker is superior to the other, etc.) and where the conversation is taking place.

2) Teachers and material writers have always used invented stories. A typical example of an invented story is that of the group of friends who were in the car crash and were injured. Thus, such situations as ‘Jane cannot walk’ or ‘Julia can’t play tennis’, etc. appear. Invented stories provide endless scope, but it is difficult to make them believable. They place a great demand on a teacher’s and a material writer’s imaginative powers.

On the other hand, V.I. Skalkin defines a communicative situation as a dynamic system of interactive concrete aspects of subjective and objective nature (speech included). These specific aspects involve a person into speech intercourse and define his communicative behaviour within one (interlocutory) communicative act.