Effective English speaking courses for beginners Part 3

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Did you try answering the questions in the previous video?
What was the English word he was looking for when he said portable bed?
What  did  he  mean  by  the  people  in  charge  of  looking  after  people  that  have  had accidents?
Which of the Communication Strategies was he using in both cases?
Compare your answers with these:
The first word the Danish speaker did not manage to remember (or did not
know) was stretcher. The second was paramedics or ambulance crew. In
both cases he used paraphrase to resolve the problem.

Now let’s us go to
The second task

For this task you will need to have a partner you can speak to in English. (If you don’t
have  someone  you  can  work  with  face  to  face, ,  you  could  use  web  software  such  as Voxapop at http://www.voxopop.com/    

Think  of  something  special  or  unique  about  the  culture  of  your  region.  It  could  be  a sport, or a dish, or a piece of clothing, and so on. It is important that your partner is not familiar with the things you have chosen, because that means they will have to make an effort to understand you. 

Describe it to your partner in English.  When you find it difficult to find the right words,
use a communication strategy.

Conversational repair

A  different  sort  of  problem  can  occur  when  you  are  talking  to someone  and  you  use  a  word  which  they  do  not  know  or understand. The term covering the various ways in which this sort or difficulty can be resolved is conversational repair. 

Again,  we  may  need  to  use  this  sort  of  repair  in  own  language, too.  In  fact,  our  next  example  involved  two  native  speakers  of English:  A,  an  American  woman  visiting  Edinburgh,  and  S,  a  local resident.  A  had  asked  S  for  advice  on  where  she  could  go  for  a cycle ride. 

To  understand  the  problem,  you  need  to  know  that  cobbles  (or cobblestones) is the name for the  squared stones  that  you see in the older streets in Edinburgh, such as the Royal Mile.

Now read the conversation. What was the misunderstanding over the underlined question?

A: What about going down by the Firth of Forth?
S: That should be fun, shouldn't it? Yes, you could. You can ride right along the edge,   
  you know, without having to keep to the main road. That should be great, actually. You
  could do that.
A: Is it very rough down there, though?
S: Well, there are no cobbles as far as I can remember. Have you tried riding on the  cobbles?
A: No, but I was thinking rather more... rough in terms of the people.  
S: Oh I see. Well, I don't think so. I don't know. Parts of it are quite poor, particularly the

  Pilton area.



Source
Tony Lynch and Kenneth Anderson, English Language Teaching Centre, University of Edinburgh 2012

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