Alright! Pada Kesempatan kali ini saya kan berbagi e-book gratis lagi nih. E-book nya berjudul "Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy" . Cukup Menarik bukan?!. Mari kita lihat kutipan Introduction nya, Siapa tahu ada yang berminat untuk membaca lebih lanjut :
Introduction
Casual conversation is a fundamental human activity, and one in which most of us engage many times a day. It may take the form of small talk about the weather at the supermarket check-out, or
gossip about colleagues around the office coffee machine, or an extended phone conversation with a close friend about the meaning of life. Before getting down to the business at hand, sales reps chat with their clients, doctors chat with their patients, waiters with diners, and teachers with their students. Strangers at a bus stop will start up a conversation to vent their frustration about the service. Taxi drivers famously air their opinions, seldom solicited. Your dentist will chat away even when your responses are reduced to grunts. Fellow passengers on a long-haul flight will exchange pleasantries before settling in to watch the movie. Listeners will phone a radio talk show to sound off about local crime, and teenagers will talk for hours on their cell phones about matters of apparently enormous consequence. Even very young children chat away with their parents, and by the age of three are able to have fairly sustained conversations with their playmates.
Conversational talk crosses age groups, gender, class, culture and ethnicity. Levelt (1989) calls it ‘the canonical setting for speech in all human societies’. Indeed, the stylistic features of conversation have extended beyond spoken talk itself and ‘crossed over’ into other modes and media, such as the popular press and advertising, a process called conversationalization by Fairclough (1992). And the advent and rapid expansion of the use of email, text messaging and online chat have further blurred the distinction between spoken and written language, while underscoring the ubiquitous role of conversation in human affairs. The centrality of conversation to human discourse owes to the fact that it is the primary location for the enactment of social values and relationships. Through talk we establish, maintain and modify our social identities. The role that conversation plays in our formation as social beings starts at an early age. Stubbs (1983: IX) asserts that ‘infants learn, as it were, to engage in conversation before they learn language’, and Hatch (1978: 404) claims that ‘language learning evolves out of learning how to carry on conversations, out of learning how to communicate’. Even as far back as the 1930s, Harold Palmer argued that all language use is based on, and is an extension of, conversation, adding that conversation must therefore be the start of any study of language. In Palmer’s day, this meant prioritizing the teaching of pronunciation. The nature of spoken language itself was barely understood and for a long time spoken language was taught as if it were simply a less formal version of written language. This is a view that has been rectified only recently, with the advent of corpus linguistics and the consequent amassing of corpora of spoken data. Findings from such data now heavily inform the content of learner dictionaries, such as the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (second edition 2005), and descriptive grammars, such as the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999).
Finally, sociocultural theories of learning, such as those that derive from Vygotsky’s research into children’s cognitive development, foreground the role of conversation as the medium for all learning, and have contributed to the notion that effective teaching is, essentially, a ‘long conversation’ (Mercer, 1995). Recent research into second-language acquisition also supports the view that the learning of second languages may be successfully mediated through conversational interaction (van Lier, 1996). Such a view not only reinforces the arguments for an approach to language teaching that systematically deals with spoken English, but would seem to vindicate the intuitions of those legions of learners who consistently demand inclusion of more ‘conversation’ in their language courses. For all these reasons, an account of how conversation works is therefore essential in the development of a pedagogy for second-language learning. This book aims to meet this need by providing the reader with first an overview of the features that characterize conversation and distinguish it from other spoken and written genres (Chapter 1), followed by a systematic description of conversational English, including its vocabulary (Chapter 2), its grammar (Chapter 3), its discourse structure (Chapter 4), and its characteristic generic patterning (Chapter 5), and then an informed account of its development in both first- and secondlanguage acquisition (Chapters 6 and 7). On this basis, and after a review of teaching approaches to date (Chapter 8), an integrated approach to the teaching of conversation will be outlined, along with practical classroom applications (Chapter 9).
Oke, cukup menarik bukan?! Bagi rekan - rekan yang berminat untuk menambah koleksi e-booknya silahkan download file Pdfnya dibawah ini : Baca juga tentang "Creating Classroom Communities of Learning"