Uncorking the Speaking Skill: Wine and Prosody in Conversation

Abstract

Although the skill of speaking is necessary for attaining basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS), most traditional second language acquisition programs base their pedagogy and curriculums on lexis and grammar of the written form and phonology/phonetics. The purpose of this project is to demonstrate how to effectively adapt content-specific material for developing the speaking skill at community colleges with adult students who are interested in pursuing a career in the wine industry as a sommelier. Courses for becoming a sommelier or a server in the wine industry are traditionally offered at community colleges under the culinary arts and hospitality management programs, but not typically in conjunction with ESL department course offerings. A document analysis on tasks in language teaching, the communicative language teaching (CLT) approach, and grammar of the spoken language was conducted in order to identify ways to adapt appropriate materials. This field project was informed by the works of Carter and McCarthy on grammar of the spoken language, corpora of spoken English, and the seminal works of Rebecca Hughes on teaching and researching speaking. It was grounded in the theory and methodology of interactional linguistics, prosody in conversation, the communicative language teaching approach, and by the works of Zoltán Dörnyei and Sarah Thurrell on communication and dialogues in action. This project demonstrates prosody in communication by turning authentic dialogues in action from adapted readings of a sommelier prep course into videos of the dialogues in unscripted real communicative interaction. The videos showed prosody in communication, suggesting that the communicative language teaching (CLT) approach could benefit from this kind of material for developing the speaking skill