Including Conversation Strategies in an English Communication Course

Communicative language teaching is aimed at improving the learner’s communicative competence. Strategic competence is an important component of communicative competence, and it is believed that communication strategies play an important role in the development of strategic competence, and therefore the development of a learner’s overall communicative competence. Because this skill was not at that time a part of the first-year English Communication curriculum at Sojo University, strategies for English conversation were introduced as a new component of the curriculum. As students move through the course, they build towards speaking assessments where their ability to participate in a conversation with their peers is evaluated. Conversation strategies were chosen and taught in order to facilitate students’ success in these assessments. This report introduces the rationale behind the inclusion of conversation strategies, which strategies were taught, what students thought about them, and finally, how this component of the curriculum fared during remote learning conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. To better understand which strategies were the most helpful to our students and whether students felt strategies impacted their performance in the speaking assessments are the aims of this report