Tips for Teachers

•  To provide an instructional framework aimed at giving students exposure to and raising their          awareness of real life behaviors in face-to-face interaction in English.  This is based partly on the idea that speech behaviors are not easily generalized and therefore instruction should be based on observation of real-life individuals.
• To promote student involvement in their ow learning.  In this case, especially to help students develop the ability to carefully observe and analyze behaviors in their linguistic environment.
• To help students develop patterns of behavior conducive to the development of interactional skills.  That is, the materials are designed to be used as experiential tools rather than simply informational and to guide students in evaluating and reformulating their own behaviors based on what they learn through observation.

The materials on this web page provide a template for the study of speech behaviors.  It also includes internet resources and a final project.  I suggest you start with Exploring Beliefs and then Methods of Investigating.  From there, pick and choose the different speech behaviors as you wish and add your own as is appropriate to your course.  Below are some suggestions to make your efforts more effective.

• Insist that students take responsibility for their observations.  "I couldn't find anything" can be countered with 1) finding out how and where they looked and a suggestion for better results 2) a suggestion to find another source.  For example, (and this may very well happen) if a student does not encounter any examples of persuasion in the time allotted, they can try formulating questions and doing an informal interview of a native speaker or they may try looking it up in a book or on the internet.
• Encourage students to adopt a recursive approach to their information gathering.  One simple observation may not be enough.  If they observe, form ideas, check them with you, look again, and so on, this will help them to refine their ideas and hopefully increase their accuracy, too.
• Encourage students to share what they're doing and what they've found by email, both with you and their classmates.  This will serve the purposes of both spreading ideas and letting you know what the students have been doing before you get to class so you will be better prepared to address them.
• Help the students develop their skills in analyzing.  Analyzing probably won't be easy for them, but with your expert viewpoint and contribution of ideas and possibilities they can develop useful skills and metacognitive knowledge they can continue to use in their own lives after your class has come and gone.
• Be sure to follow up observations and analyses with attempts to reformulate behaviors.  Again, at first students may not have any idea what to do.  You can give them advice and practice these reformulated behaviors in role plays.  You may also want students to keep records of their plans for how they can use what they've learned.

Needless to say, the better you understand the issues covered in your class, the better you will be able to relate and clarify this information to your students.  Research has a lot to teach us.  I suggest you start by taking a look at the Links and Resources I have compiled and adding to them through your own investigation.
 
 
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