Sessions

Chat-Style Writing in Teaching Conversation

This study analyzes video-recorded interactions of 14 pairs of Japanese university students learning English as a foreign language to determine qualitatively the similarities and differences in their ways of managing pragmatically competent conversations in English before and after incorporating chat-style writing into instruction. Here, chat-style writing is an original teaching method devised by the presenter using relay-style writing, similar to exchanging written messages and SNS chats, for the purpose of encouraging conversation according to the context. Presentation focuses on utterances that answer questions and on ways of using other-initiated repetition (allo-repetition) for backchannels and confirmation of the interlocutors’ comprehension. As a tentative result, the conversation recorded after the adoption of the chat-style writing showed development in the amount and content of answers to questions, and the number of allo-repetitions by the listener was slightly reduced. However, there were several interactions where the interlocutors reverted to Japanese when they could not use English expressions very well. Based on these findings, the author considers the similarities and differences between speaking exercises and writing exercises and scrutinizes this practical method by considering the degree of contribution that chat-style writing can make to conversational instruction.