Scott Thornbury

The vocabulary of conversation

Introduction What characterizes the vocabulary of conversation? For example, how many words do speakers typically use? What distinguishes the lexis of casual conversation from more formal and less spontaneous forms of spoken language, and from written language? How many – and which – words do you need, to be able to take part in conversations in a second language? These are some of the main issues dealt with in this chapter. The point needs to be made, however, that the notion of vocabulary item is going to be stretched to include not only single words, but groups of words, and not only lexical items (such as those that would be included in a learners vocabulary list) but items that have a grammatical or discoursal function. This expanded notion of lexis is in keeping with current thinking that views the boundaries between grammar and lexis, and between discourse and grammar, as fuzzy in the extreme. Nevertheless, for convenience, this chapter groups a variety of conversational phenomena under the general term vocabulary . Much of the evidence for the description that follows draws on the findings of corpus linguistics and so a brief outline of the principles and goals of this discipline is in order. A corpus (plural corpora ) is a collection of actually occurring texts (either spoken or written), stored and accessed by means of computers, and available for study and analysis by grammarians, lexicographers, teachers and language learners. Corpora can vary in size from fewer than a million words to several hundreds of millions (as is the case with both the COBUILD corpus and the British National Corpus (BNC)).

Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy: Acquiring L1 conversational competence

Introduction In the chapters so far, we have been concerned – from various points of view – with describing conversation: how is it structured? what is its purpose? how does it differ from other ways of using language? The purpose of the description is to help inform the teaching of conversation. But a description is not a pedagogy (i.e. a way of teaching). Simply describing the rudiments of conversation to learners is likely to be about as effective as describing the rudiments of grammar – ultimately a fairly unproductive and even frustrating exercise. A pedagogy, to be fully effective, must take into account the way that conversational skills develop in a first language and the way that they respond to instruction in a second. It is the purpose of this chapter and the next, therefore, to review current theory and recent research into the acquisition of conversational competence. First, though, it is necessary to explain what we mean by conversational competence. Conversational competence The notion of conversational competence derives from Chomskys (1965) distinction between competence and performance . According to Chomsky, competence is the idealized and internalized knowledge of the rules of grammar that native speakers possess, and which allows them to distinguish well-formed from ill-formed sentences. Competence contrasts with performance, which is the way that this idealized knowledge is realized, with all its ‘imperfections’, in actual speech. The concept of competence was subsequently extended by Hymes to include not just knowledge of the rules of grammar, but knowledge of ‘when to speak, when not, and … what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner’ (1972b: 277).