Developing conversational competence throughlanguage awareness and multimodality: the useof DVDs

The argument for a pedagogy of input oriented learning for the development of speakingcompetence (Sharwood-Smith, 1986; Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury, 2004; Eslami-Rasekh,2005) has been of increasing interest in Applied Linguistics circles. It has also been argued thatmultimedia applications, in particular DVDs, provide language learners with multimodalrepresentations that may help them ‘to gain broad access to oral communication both visuallyand auditory’ (Tschirner, 2001: 305). Thus this paper focuses on an exploratory study ofteaching oral interaction through input processing by means of multimodal texts.The paper is divided into a number of interconnected sections. First, we outline brieflywhat teaching conversation implies and examine the important role of oral comprehensionin the development of conversational interaction. In fact, it has been suggested that effectivespeaking depends very much on successful understanding (Oprandy, 1994). In this paper wepay special attention to the crucial role of context in understanding oral interactions.Therefore, we outline the theory of context in English Language Teaching (ELT). The discussiondraws on approaches to teaching conversation and it also offers a brief reflectionabout the need for materials which might convey the sociocultural and semiotic elements oforal communication through which meaning is created.We then discuss the decisions taken to propose a new multimodal approach to teachingconversation from a three-fold perspective: (a) the selection of texts taken from films, and thebenefits of using DVDs (digital versatile disc); (b) the development of a multimodal analysis offilm clips for the design of activities; and (c) the promotion of a conversation awarenessmethodology through a bank of DVD clips to achieve an understanding of how nativespeakers actually go about the process of constructing oral interactions.In sum, the main thrust of this paper is to pinpoint the advantages of using multimodalmaterials taken from DVDs, as they provide learners with broad access to oral communication,both visual and auditory, making classroom conditions similar to the target cultural environment(Tschirner, 2001)