How can teachers best enable adult English language learners to interact verbally?

The study revolves around the delivery of an ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) program on conflict management in the workplace to a small group of adult learners studying in a private educational institution in Sydney, Australia. The program was of four days¡¯ duration, and was delivered over a four-week period. It involved both in-class and out-of-class tasks, and required learners to analyse their own discourse practices, those of other learners, and those of the speech community in which they were living. The program had two principle objectives. Firstly, it asked whether learners are able to modify their discourse practices at will in order to achieve successful negotiation outcomes. Secondly, it explored the effect of deliberately altered discourse styles on perceptions of learners held by speech community members. The methodology employed to achieve these objectives was ethnographic in nature and involved the following processes: 1. Learners were video-taped negotiating with other learners before and after the program. 2. Learners undertook the program aimed at increasing their ability to negotiate in business environments using culturally appropriate spoken language in conjunction with compatible prosodic and paralinguistic features as well as conversation management strategies. Learners kept diaries of their experiences and self-evaluation, and were interviewed following the course. 3. A group of nine native speakers of English viewed the 'before' and 'after' video-tapes and completed a survey aimed at collecting and quantitatively measuring (change in) their perceptions of the learners. This change was statistically analysed using a repeated-measures t test. The effect proved statistically significant overall; t(80) = 1.990, p&gt.01, two-tailed. 4. The 'before' and 'after' negotiations were then analysed by the researcher using ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis, modified to include some aspects of facial expression. The implications of the findings for teaching 'Business English', 'Global English' and 'Speaking' more generally are then discussed