Help Students Learn the Art of Conversation – Not Interrogation

Have you ever had a lesson that made you feel like you were being interrogated?

OK, that’s an exaggeration, but you’ve probably experienced something like this before:

Your student asks you a question.
You respond.
Immediately, your student asks another question.
You respond, and once again, your student launches into another question.

On the plus side, the student is taking initiative and trying to lead the conversation instead of leaving all that to us, and that’s great! We applaud them!

But on the downside, asking a rapid-fire succession of questions isn’t really a conversation. It’s more of an interview at best and a police interrogation at worst.

So today, today we’ll talk about why some students do this and share a simple trick we can teach them to make their conversations more, well... conversational.

The Problem

What’s happening is that the student probably learned somewhere that they need to ask questions to make conversation. Even though this is good advice, it leads to situations like this when misapplied:

I would prepare lists of questions to bring to business lunches with foreign clients. Then I would go through the questions in the lists one-by-one. But then at some point I’d run out of questions. And even before that happened, I could tell the conversation was awkward, but I wasn’t sure why.
One of our students from Japan

If we were to make a visual diagram of conversations like this, they’d probably look something like this:

Solution

If you thought the diagram looked a little too angular, you’re right. While conversations need a mix of questions and answers, good conversations don’t simply zigzag between them.

To help your student “round out” their conversations, you can introduce them to a conversational strategy which we’ll simply call “comments.” After someone responds to a question, people generally comment on the response.

Arisa comments “Wow, that’s a long time!” before asking her next question.

Comments are used even in the simplest dialogues, like when asking someone for their name.

You’ve probably also heard comments like this before:

Short comments like these can help our students make their conversations more natural and pleasant, and sometimes even lead to mini-conversations of their own.

Once your students get used to making comments, their conversations should look more like this:

Instead of a steady flow of questions which may be exhausting to answer, questions are spaced out and rounded out with comments on the responses.

👋 That’s it for now!

So next time you encounter a student who asks questions machine gun-style, you can introduce them to the concept of comments and maybe point out some parts of the conversation where they could have made some.

You can also encourage them to watch some English movies or TV shows and see how other people make conversation. For example, how often do they make comments? What phrases do they use to do this? To get them started, here’s a Youtube video that even beginners could watch and learn from.

If your students are interested in making their conversations more natural or pleasant, you can also introduce them to these expressions of empathy as well as other techniques, such as backchanneling.

Finally, you may want to remind such students to give their conversation partner a chance to ask questions themselves! Happy tutoring!