Pitfalls of Attribution—Conversational Styles in Language Education

Abstract

Speech readiness, willingness to communicate and levels of speaking skills, i.e. factors crucial for the learner’s communicative competence, develop in the course of interaction in the EFL classroom or beyond it. Yet intensity and type of interaction depend on inferences conversational partners make about their interlocutors based on the way they speak. Conversational styles play an important role in interpersonal relations since both positive and negative personality characteristics tend to be ascribed to particular ways of using silence and speech in a particular speech community. The role of conversational styles grows in importance in the process of developing intercultural communicative competence as cross-cultural differences result in mismatches leading to the perception of otherness, and, in consequence, to distance and conflict. Implications are sought for ways to raise awareness of these issues in teachers and learners of second and foreign languages.