8th Meeting: Family Conversation

Taken from http://www.sis.ac/diary-yanapuma-spanish-student

Yes! Today we learn about the family tree combined with the Possessive Pronoun. In my classroom, my students love this parts and the exercises because they can personally relate the vocabulary and reading to their own family. Also, there's that opportunity to show (off) pictures of you and your family.

In our Spanish Class, we complete the family tree in our worksheet, and complete listening task. Then we drew our own family tree and work in groups of three. By this time (8th class meeting), our 'conversation' flow much better because we know the questions, the 'connection'/filler sentences and phrases, we got more accustomed to the phatic conversation practices. So we can safely say that we are 'talking' Spanish.

Now, let's talk about about Phatic Interaction:

The Oxford Online Dictionary defines Phatic as “denoting or relating to language used for general purposes of social interaction, rather than to convey information or ask questions.” Therefore, Phatic Interaction means small talk. ‘Hello’, ‘how are you’, ‘nice weather, isn’t it?’, ‘fancy meeting you here, Fred’, ‘See you later and hi to your mother’ are all examples of phatic interaction. It can be verbal or non-verbal. Non-verbal phatic interaction can take form as waving to someone you know across the street or gesturing  ‘call me’ or I’ll call you’  to a girl on the bus after a date with your thumb and little finger to your ear. In Indonesian language, Phatic is  basa-basi, meaning nonsense talk or “beat around the bush” talk. Nevertheless, our daily communication relies heavily on this to bridge a smooth and interesting communication.  

Phatic Interaction/communication is important to be learned or taught to second language (L2) learner. It has an important social function. It helps L2 learners to be more natural in their conversation instead of sounding like they are memorizing cue cards straight from textbook. Phatic communication contains knowledge and sense social norms or customs that are different from one areas to another. L2 learners who are not familiar with this phatic communication may interpret it the wrong way. An L2 learner came to UK for the first time and went to small café to buy coffee. She was greeted with “Hiya! You alright? Can I get you anything?”. She smiled politely but puzzled and checked herself in the mirror thinking if she looked sick or ‘not alright’. 

The aim of learning second or foreign language to certain extend is to be able to communicate with the speaker of the target language. The teaching of second or foreign language is to prepare student to be able to participate in real life conversation outside the classroom.  As mundane and easy as it may seem, a talk or a conversation is complex in nature. It is more than just forming correct syntactic and semantic sentences. It also involves the conversational skill that observes social customs and values on top of the substantive content of our message.

There 2 kinds of interaction in a conversation, Interactional and Transactional (McCarthy, 1996: 136 - 137). Burns (2001: 126) in Todd (1998: 7) provides us with the definition

“Transactional interactions are those primarily involving the exchange of some form of good and service, or information, while interactional interactions primarily involve the creation, maintenance and extension of personal and social relations”.

Interactional interaction takes up the majority of our communication flow. Phatic interaction belong to this category.

Lee (2001: 23) in Todd (1998: 23) says that the ESL teacher’s job is “not to implant the ways of native speakers in the learners, but to inform learners of their pragmatic choices and consequences”. One way of doing this is for teacher to use the CA/DA approach in their teaching. In doing so, students are taught not just to memorize chunks of conversation but to be aware of its functions and meaning. Conversation (and talk exchanges in general) has structure that most of the time not apparent to the speakers. Nevertheless when asked to recall the ‘unsuccessful’ conversation, one may become aware of the conversational expectation it required (Akmaijan 2001:387, 388).

With the renewed understanding of the conversational functions, L2 learners will be more confidence to initiate/engage in a conversation and have the skill to carry it through. In conclusion, it is possible to use CA/DA in English Language classroom or any L2 classroom, Phatic interaction is still important to be highlighted especially the one that are not apparent in textbook as this is crucial for social function. The acquisition of these conversational skills is beneficial for one’s communicative ability in English or other L2.-