‘No chance to speak’: Teaching turn-taking skills for group work

Many international students report difficulties recognizing appropriate moments to contribute to group discussions. In response, a turn-taking strand was developed for an advanced listening and speaking program, aimed at developing awareness of turn-taking opportunities, and the skills to seize those opportunities and manage the discourse topic. We discuss the insights from Conversation Analysis that have informed this project and associated reflections from an ongoing action research project; we then demonstrate the routine activities that we have found most useful. We focus initially on ‘projection’, aiming to sensitize learners to the intonational, grammatical and pragmatic cues that give advance warning of the next potential opportunity to speak. We then highlight how language users can seize the floor, creating time to formulate a response. We also address the issue of ‘what to say’, focusing on topic-management, highlighting how speakers initiate, pursue, shift and terminate topics