Toward authentic communication
Subtitle: analyzing discourse in adult ESOL instruction in an art museum
By: Kate Bowen Gill
Contributors: Harvard University. Graduate School of Education
Published: 2007
Language: eng
Number of pages: 146
Subjects: Art; Study and teaching; Language arts; Correlation with content subjects; English language; Foreign speakers; Museums; Educational aspects
Description: Authentic communication is widely discussed by second language acquisition theorists and educators as effective in developing second language competence (Breen, 1985; Legenhausen, 2000; Krashen, 2003; Rivers, 1987; Stryker and Leaver, 1997; van Lier, 2001). The two studies in this thesis provide evidence of authentic communication in the context of instructional practice, and demonstrate how adult learners develop communicative competence in English by participating in it. The first study defines authentic communication as discourse created by conversants who "reciprocally factor the intentions of the other into their interactions" (Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser & Long, 2003, p.136) and conceptualizes it as having two dimensions: (1) audience awareness on the part of speakers, and (2) responsive listening on the part of hearers. It describes five Critical Exploration (Duckworth, 2004) conversations among a small group of adult English Speakers of Other Language (ESOL) learners and two ESOL tutors as they look at and talk about two Cézanne paintings in an art museum over a period of five weeks. The functions of utterances among very young children and caretakers as they discuss common referents in first language were used to suggest indices of authentic communication in speakers' utterances. Audiotapes were transcribed and indices of these functions computed. The analyses showed that the functions aligned with three purposes in discourse: topic-related exchange of information, management of the conversation, and management of the speaker's own discourse.

The first study described speakers' interactions in terms of these three purposes, and suggests further research into how individual speakers manage their own discourse in the context of authentic communication. The second study focuses on one learner, Juan. The most striking finding was that, from the outset, Juan expressed complex intents in the conversational context. This suggests that adults' capacity for authentic communication is an important resource that should be drawn upon when teaching second languages. These studies contribute to research on group inquiry and interactions among adult learners, and to research based on the single adult learner over time, and have relevance for teachers and researchers in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).
Notes: Vita.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2007.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-134)