back channel responses used by a listener to reassure the speaker that they are listening and following the story. e.g. uhuh, I know. theme the point of departure of the message in spoken discourse. e.g. the tank rheme the part of the message that transmits what we want to say e.g. was completely empty transaction marker a feature that indicates a shift in topic or conversational focus e.g. anyway discourse the real language of written and/or spoken interaction or communication beyond the single 'sentence' level, in context coherence for discourse: the quality of being meaningful and unified transactional discourse discourse in which the purpose is to ask for information etc interactional discourse discourse to maintain a relationship illocutionary force the intended cultural, context-defined and culture sensitive meaning of an utterance speech act each individual move in a conversation OR another term for function e.g. praising, recommending, etc. locutionary meaning the meaning of words out of context adjacency pairs a pair of speech acts in which the first utterance requires an immediate and possibly standard response. e.g. A: can I come in? B: sure! they could be greeting-greeting, offer-acceptance/refusal, question-expected answer, blame-denial topic shift the changes in direction that occur in conversation, often unexpectedly but sometimes clearly signalled conversational repair when a speaker attempts to correct or deal with problems that arise in the course of a conversation. examples include clarifying what someone else has said e.g. 'are you saying..?'; clarifying what we have said e.g 'what I'm saying is ....'; chack someone is following us e.g. 'are you with me?'; showing that we are lost e.g. 'I'm not with you'. these are important strategies for students to learn prominence another word for sentence stress, when we stress important words.speech event like a written text, but spoken. a speech event can involve any number of people. e.g. a political debate. a speech etc reciprocity the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit reformulation changing the language you use an saying things in 'another way' to enhance and facilitate a conversation communicative competence It not only refers to a learner's ability to apply and use grammatical rules, but also to form correct utterances, and know how to use these utterances appropriately. (communicative approach) phatic communication communication that is used to establish a mood of sociability rather than to communicate information or ideas. e.g small talk like 'nice day isn't it?' fluency the ability to understand and manipulate appropriate language and respond to the message being communicated in real time accuracy the use of language without verbal or grammatical mistakes complexity using structures that are more typical of higher level learners than lower level ones