Stephen Richmond, with Bruno Vannieu, Jean-Luc Azra and Tsuguyo Torikawa

This is the First Edition. The New Edition (2009) is here.

Conversations in Class was written with the singular purpose of training (low) intermediate level Japanese university students to conduct original, personal exchanges of information in a culturally appropriate manner.

Frequent pair practice is an integral part of the course, and students will learn much about the lifestyles, habits and opinions of their classmates and teacher. They will build their skills and confidence while discovering that it is easy to have conversations about everyday life, by combining a few simple yet flexible grammar structures and interesting vocabulary together with some culturally- based guidelines.

What teaching contexts is Conversations in Class especially appropriate for ?

Genuine low-intermediate university students, because such students have all learnt patterns such as “Have you ever…?” or “How often do you…?”, but have never put them into practice in the context of meaningful conversations. We have designed CiC so that it is structured enough for the learners to have a solid grammatical foundation, but also free enough for them to construct their own conversations, and negotiate meaning in their own way. We think that this is one of the strengths of our book. We occupy the mid-point that many textbooks seem to neglect: most are either too grammar-heavy or too vaguely ‘communicative’, telling students ‘go and talk about this'.

Mixed-levels classes, because the simple way Grammar Toolboxes are presented allows the entire class to have a common basic focus, upon which they can build as they feel confident. Low-intermediate students will learn for the first time to use a wide range of useful sentence patterns. Higher-level students (intermediate to advanced) will find it useful to review these sentence patterns and get to the point where they can use them effortlessly. They will also be able to pick up additional vocabulary and phrases in the optional One Step Further and Dialogues sections.

Key features :

The Grammar Toolboxes are simple graphic devices which introduce the material needed for a number of questions and answers on a given topic. Students use one basic structure to create the questions and answers they want or need for real communication. The flexibility of this toolbox format enables learners to create as many meaningful things as possible with as little grammar as possible.

Pragmatic advice : throughout the textbook, students will be given the opportunity to practice, and incorporate into the speech, simple pragmatic strategies that will allow them to sound more natural when they speak English.

Optional sections (One Step Further) are designed to keep the better students busy. They don’t have to be covered in class. Lessons are designed so that they will keep their consistency even if these sections are not covered by the teacher (for example, the exercises at the end of each lesson don’t conatin anything related to them). In fact, these sections are designed for the students to study by themselves, if they have time and their level is good nough.

About us:

Stephen Richmond, the main author of CiC, has six conversation classes a week at Shiga Prefectoral University, five using CiC and one using print-outs with prototype lessons for the revamped CiC.