INTRODUCTION

Conversations are listener- or person-oriented (Brown & Yule, 1983; Slade, 1986). As in other speaking tasks, a conversation requires the speaker to ‘face temporal constraints and the social pressures of face-to-face interaction’ (Chafe, 1986, p. 16). A conversation is a truly communicative event which is ‘a dynamic exchange in which linguistic competence must adapt itself to the total informational input, both linguistic and paralinguistic’ (Savignon, 1971, cited in Higgs & Clifford, 1982, p. 58).

Conversations ‘begin with greetings and progress through various ordered moves: the speaker's and hearer's roles are ascertained, topics are introduced, rights to talk are assumed, new topics are raised, and at the appropriate time, the conversation is terminated in a suitable manner’ (Richards, 1983, p. 118). Put briefly, the speaker and the hearer have to take the initiative, ask questions, or express disagreement in the conversation, all of which require a command of particular language features and which ‘can be learnt’ (Underhill, 1987, p. 45). The conversation class reported here is based on this assumption of learnability.

In the researchers' opinion, traditional conversation classes in Hong Kong are characterised by the following features:

1. Input: There is a focus on formal aspects of language and a lack of attention to the processes of conversational interaction, including the collaborative aspects of conversational interaction, and the negotiation of conversational meanings and messages (Richards, 1985). Class input is typically provided by the teacher.

2. Error treatment and feedback: Errors are corrected by the teacher and the teacher alone during the practice, or forgotten entirely after it, with little attention to paralinguistics.

3. […]