The Use of Dialogues in Language Teaching

The dialogue can be used as an introductory teaching technique for presenting English grammar and developing conversational ability.

Using Dialogues to Demonstrate Grammar

Inductive recognition of a grammatical rule or paradigm.
Grammar explanation.
Intensive practice of structurally correct but functional English.

Why Use a Dialogue to Teach Grammar?

It provides a context for the language being presented.
Students practise the language directly rather than simply talking about it.
There is a strong link between language and situation, including the physical setting in which the dialogue takes place.

Using Dialogues to Facilitate Conversation

To provide students with a stock of useful expressions, together with their characteristic rhythm and intonation. These may include the clichés of conversation, frequently used expressions, greetings, rejoinders and expletives, which can subsequently be recombined.
To enable students to produce these expressions quickly in new situations and in new combinations, rather than simply knowing the segments by heart in their original sequence.

Why Use a Dialogue to Develop Conversation?

It is perhaps the closest that a coursebook can get to face-to-face conversation.
Memorisation and recall can be aided by visual material such as pictures, flashcards and stick-figure drawings.
Dialogues avoid the limitations of simple question-and-answer formats and can remain relatively short.
The language of a dialogue can be natural and appropriate, with sufficient redundancy to provide opportunities for practising weak forms and other features of conversational English.
Dialogues provide scope for recombination and development through activities such as re-enactment, parallel production and short skits.

Recreational Dialogues and Skits

The dialogue can also provide the starting point for creative activities in which students adapt or extend an existing situation.

Adapt the situational elements, such as the characters or place, of the original dialogue.
Use a one-sided dialogue, for example a telephone conversation in which only one speaker is heard.
Provide the beginning or middle of a response pair and ask students to improvise the completion.
Provide a punch-line without the preceding dialogue and ask students to invent the lead-up.
Give students a list of words as a guide.
Ask students to use the word list to combine the basic elements of character, situation and plot.
Create puppet plays using settings from previous dialogues.
Use pictures or cartoons with captions as the basis for creating dialogues.
Invent dialogues to illustrate particular differences in language, meaning or situation.

Dialogue Presentation

1. Set the scene

Arouse interest and anticipation. This can be done through mime, pictures, slides or maps, or by preparing the relevant semantic area through a competition or game.

2. Focus on the meaning of the exchange

Begin with global understanding, using questions which encourage students to identify the situation and the overall meaning.

3. Familiarise students with the actual utterances

Move from global understanding to intensive work on the language itself. Techniques can include dialogue reconstruction and vanishing prompts.

4. Practise and manipulate the language

Use formal manipulation, such as substituting different items in the dialogue. Exploit useful expressions for conversation and useful examples of syntax or morphology for grammar presentation.

Directed dialogue / guided conversation: Lift lines from the original dialogue and use them as prompts, gradually encouraging students to produce the responses themselves.

5. Create new utterances and new dialogues

The final stage is to move beyond the original dialogue. Students use the language they have learnt to create new utterances and, eventually, new dialogues in different situations.

Situational Dialogues and the Role of Rote Learning

The 44 dialogues each focus on a particular situation and act as vehicles for practising the formulae most frequently used in situations such as asking the way, asking for change, being at a railway station, answering the telephone, complaining and apologising.

The language presented is essentially a survival kit for situations in which the phrasebook requirements are more or less predictable. There is a neat system of providing variant formulae and allowing students to take one part of the dialogue while the speaker on the audio cassette takes the other, after complete versions of the dialogues have been presented.

Michael Ockenden's successful book has been criticised, unfairly in my opinion, on two grounds:

that it is based on the premise that language is predictable;
that it presents rather contrived dialogues which lack the redundancy of real conversation.

In defence of Situational Dialogues, I would substitute the premise that, in many situations, what needs to be said and how it is usually said are in fact fairly predictable.

In attempting to speak other languages, I know the extent to which it is possible to depend on rehearsed formulae without automatically being derailed by unexpected events or interventions.

I have witnessed cabin crew on an airline display commendable fluency in languages which are not their own, although only within a limited number of situations which they have rehearsed. These include giving safety instructions, offering duty-free goods for sale, inviting passengers to buy drinks and collecting unwanted newspapers and magazines.

Rote Learning Has a Role to Play in Developing Communication Skills

While acknowledging that these rehearsed "party pieces" are not examples of conversation, I have always encouraged learners to develop a good stock of them. They are valid phrases to have as part of a survival kit.

Rote learning has sometimes been given a bad press. However, having useful phrases available for ready recall increase learners' confidence and provides them with language to work with if they are to have any chance of developing good English pronunciation.

Developing good phonology, intonation and stress patterns requires both rehearsal and some language to work with. One aspect of language aptitude is oral memory, which can be improved with practice.

The learners with the best oral memories that I have ever encountered were Algerian schoolchildren who had learnt the whole of the Koran by rote, but were barely able to read or write.

Another way of predicting a person's language aptitude is to test their vocabulary level in their native language. In order to develop fluency in a language, the unit of currency needs to be more than a large number of individual words. It needs to extend to a good stock of useful formulae. Otherwise, the attempt to communicate may always seem like "fumbling around for small change".

If the somewhat contrived use of dialogue can help learners to acquire useful formulae as part of their productive vocabulary, who cares whether or not these building blocks contain the complete range of features which occur in conversational English, such as false starts, hesitations, fillers, reformulations and requests for confirmation or clarification?

There is no reason why social formulae intended for rote learning should not contain many of the features of spoken English, including weak, assimilated and elided forms.

Situational Dialogues can be used either in class or for independent study. However, both the book and audio cassette are needed for this, and they are now available only as used items.

When learners at intermediate level have asked me what they can do to improve their speaking or oral fluency, I have had little hesitation in recommending Michael Ockenden's clever package, which has certainly withstood the test of time — about four decades.

Exam Question

Learning a dialogue by heart is never more than the first stage of a language-learning activity, for it is only when active use of what has been learnt by heart takes place that it can be said that language has been acquired.

Question

In what cases would you argue that the mere learning by heart of a dialogue is a justifiable end in itself, and how do you arrange the active use of what has been learnt when using dialogues in other situations?

Rote learning has never been thought of as a justifiable end in itself. Every teacher who uses it has some other purpose. The student who is never required to memorise will be severely handicapped when it comes to combining new information with old.

Essay Task

Write two short dialogues — one for an elementary class and one for an advanced class. For each dialogue, produce a lesson plan stating:

What you would teach before presenting the dialogue, if anything.
The detailed method of presenting and practising the dialogue with the class.
Methods of exploiting the dialogue.
Any potential follow-up activities.