Just talk!?

What happens if you get language learners to just talk? This was done in an experiment in which three learners were asked to do just that: talk. The result was a highly illuminating dialogue. The three learners talked about Tina Turner, asked each other how they were, where they lived, what the time was, what they did last week and what the weather was like. In other words: a highly incoherent dialogue. That is not surprising, as the learners did not have a reason to talk nor a topic to talk about. A closer analysis shows how this dialogues deviates from other, everyday dialogues: topic changes were abrupt, the speakers did not seem to be interested in what the others were saying, the interaction was mainly based on question – answer units, without the common third turn, the follow-up. There were basically no repetitions, no place holders or acknowledgements like well, erm, I see, no false starts, no self-corrections, no informal language, no hedges like you know, like, sort of, etc. A totally artificial dialogue. It is precisely this abnormal sample of language which makes us see what is normal. (Bygate, Martin: “TESOL and linguistics”, in: Culpeper, Jonathan, Katamba, Francis, et. al. (eds): English Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009: 644-645)