What’s hard about telephone conversations?
First of all, anyone who has tried to speak a foreign language can confirm that it is harder to be totally reliant on only what you hear – body langauge give us so many clues. At the very least, if I’m talking to someone in person, they can see from my fact that I’m lost or something hasn’t registered. There are visual clues to say “I’m done, you can go ahead now,” and often you just can’t hear as well on the phone as you can in real life either. How can you duplicate these conditions in class? Well, aside from having your students call each other on their mobile phones (which might not be a bad idea, actually), you can have them sit back to back so they can’t see each other at all. Next, there is the vocabulary. Idiomatic? Unusual? To be honest, I don’t know what the proper term for it is, but there are definitely ways rather different from the equivalent in English to hold a telephone conversation. Some of the examples from my above conversation are direct translations of phrases peo
