The Study of Opening and Closing of Conversations in Oral English Textbooks

Abstract

Language communication ability refers to the ability to use language in society. The acquisition of this ability by second language learners mostly relies on textbook dialogues adapted from real-life conversations. Therefore, whether scripted textbook conversations can help improve second language learners’ language communication ability should be taken seriously by the academic circle. This paper has analyzed all the conversational texts in the book Functioning in an Intercultural Community, using book1 and book2 as corpus and finds that there are deficiencies in the opening and closing of the conversation in the textbook. This study suggests that textbook compilers should improve the completeness, diversity, and colloquialism of the beginning and end of conversations, and teachers appropriately extend the form of the opening and closing of the conversation during the teaching process.