Conversation Management

Skills

Conversation management encompasses the pragmatic skills needed to navigate real-time spoken interaction: opening and closing conversations, introducing and shifting topics, taking and yielding turns, backchannelling, repairing breakdowns, and managing face. These skills are fundamental to communicative competence yet are often undertaught in ELT classrooms that focus on grammar and vocabulary at the expense of interactional competence.

Core Components

1. Opening and Closing

Conversations have ritualistic beginnings and endings:

Openings — greetings, small talk, stating purpose ("The reason I'm calling is...")
Pre-closings — signals that the conversation is ending ("Anyway...", "Well, I should go...")
Closings — farewell sequences, often with future reference ("See you tomorrow")

These are culturally specific and require explicit teaching for L2 learners.

2. Turn-taking

The system for managing who speaks when (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974):

Turn-taking cues — falling intonation, completion of a syntactic unit, eye contact, gestures
Turn-holding — fillers ("well...", "you know..."), self-selection, increased speed
Turn-yielding — questions, tag questions, trailing off, looking at the next speaker
Overlap and interruption — culturally variable; different expectations across speech communities

3. Backchannelling

Listener responses that signal engagement without claiming a turn:

Verbal: "mm-hmm", "yeah", "really?", "right", "I see"
Non-verbal: nodding, facial expressions, eye contact

Absence of backchannelling signals disinterest or incomprehension. L2 learners often fail to backchannel in their target language, creating uncomfortable silences.

4. Topic Management

Topic introduction — "Have you heard about...?", "That reminds me..."
Topic development — extending, elaborating, adding detail
Topic shift — "By the way...", "Speaking of...", "Changing the subject..."
Topic recycling — "Going back to what you said about..."

See Topic Management for detailed treatment.

5. Repair

Strategies for dealing with communication breakdowns:

Self-repair — speaker corrects own utterance
Other-initiated repair — listener signals non-understanding ("Sorry?", "What do you mean?")
Clarification requests — "Could you say that again?"
Confirmation checks — "So you mean...?"
Comprehension checks — "Does that make sense?"

6. Hedging and Vagueness

Softening assertions and managing face:

"I think...", "It seems like...", "sort of", "kind of", "more or less"
Hedging is essential for politeness and managing social relationships in conversation

Why Conversation Management Is Undertaught

Not in the coursebook — most materials teach transactional language (ordering food, giving directions) rather than interactional skills
Hard to test — conversation management does not fit neatly into discrete-point testing
Invisible to teachers — native speakers manage conversations unconsciously and may not think to teach these skills explicitly
Perceived as "not real language" — fillers, hedges, and backchannels are often dismissed as unimportant

Teaching Conversation Management

Analyse authentic conversations — recorded dialogues revealing how speakers actually manage interaction (not scripted textbook dialogues)
Consciousness-raising — highlight specific features: "How does the speaker change the topic? What words do they use?"
Practice specific skills — activities targeting one component at a time (e.g., practising backchannelling while a partner tells a story)
Role play with pragmatic goals — "End this conversation politely" rather than just "Talk about your weekend"
Record and review — recording learner conversations and analysing their conversation management strategies

Cultural Considerations

Conversation management conventions vary significantly across cultures: turn-taking norms, acceptable overlap, directness vs indirectness, silence tolerance, topic taboos, and closing rituals all differ. Teaching conversation management in ELT should develop awareness of these differences rather than imposing a single cultural norm.