The performance of speech acts in workplace conversations and the teaching of communicative functions

Abstract This article, based on a 34,000-word corpus of spoken discourse, argues for a discourse approach to teaching communicative functions or speech acts in spoken English. Starting with the premise that spoken corpora can provide valuable insights into the way speakers ‘do’ things through talk, I analyze the performance of speech acts in a corpus of workplace conversations. First a number of devices used to perform direct speech acts are analyzed in the corpus as a whole, and then the transcripts of two workplace conversations are examined in order to ascertain how the performance of two particular speech acts—giving advice and giving directives—is accomplished. These analyses show that speech acts are not usually performed directly and that it is necessary to look beyond the individual utterance to see how particular communicative acts unfold within a conversational sequence. The final section of the article discusses relevance of these findings for the teaching of functional language.