Anthony Rinaldi

Toyama Higashi SHS

Speaking and Listening

Conversation Skills Development

Class time needed for lesson: 50 minutes

Class size taught: 40 students

Target audience: 2nd year high school students

Objective: Students learn to identify and create verbal interest in order to enrich their own discussions and conversations.

目的：会話力、議論する力を高めるために、適切な返答の練習をする

Materials

•Recording of two conversations. The general content should be the same, but in one of them, one of the people should express more interest in the conversation (see the attached transcript handout for more details).

•Conversation transcript handout

•Response matching handout

•Response writing handout

Procedure:

  1. Students listen to two different conversations, specifically (in my example) to the woman. In groups, they choose the conversation in which the woman sounds more interested/invested.
  2. Students look at the transcripts of both conversations. In their groups, they identify specific ways that the woman shows her interest (discussing this in Japanese is OK). Answers may include: asking questions, adding new information, giving opinions, an energetic voice, etc. The students write these answers on the board (again, Japanese is OK as long as you can understand or the JTE can translate for you). Then, go through their list of ideas and show examples of them in the conversation transcript handout.
  3. Students complete the response matching worksheet (see attached). The responses that they are matching are examples of the techniques that they identified in the previous conversation. Call on students for their answers.
  4. Students complete the response writing worksheet (see attached). This worksheet has the correct answers from the previous worksheet written in dialogue form.This time, the students respond to the first two lines of the conversation by writing the next line of dialogue themselves. Their response should exemplify a “good response.” Sentences like “Oh, I see” or “That’s interesting” should be avoided. Call on students for their answers.

Additional information:

This lesson is the first in a series that I taught in order to help students have more natural and fluent conversations with each other, and to improve their listening skills. In the following lessons, I started moving away from writing and towards spontaneous speaking, based off of a beginning of a conversation or a role play scenario. This was actually very successful, and at the end of the semester the students were able to do generally well on a discussion test we gave them. Another benefit that came from this lesson is the list of good response characteristics that the students make—in future activities, you can remind students to give “good responses,” and they’ll have a concrete idea of what that means.