Extended speech acts between speech and writing: Challenges and opportunities for learners and teachers

Speech acts may consist of a set of utterances or text segments. These comprise a main move encoding the author’s communicative intent (e.g. “I’m sorry”) and its relevant topic (e.g. “for not coming”), and supportive moves motivating the main move (e.g. “There was a traffic jam”). Oral-dialogic and written-monologic extended speech acts elicited from native speakers reveal a high structural similarity. Their moves are interpretable as being prompted by a co-present or implied interlocutor’s contribution to the interaction. This structural similarity suggests two practical methods for the teaching of writing speech acts. In a bottom-up approach, students can extract from dialogic speech acts the moves produced by the main interlocutors, group them into paragraphs and polish them for the lexico-grammatical and cohesive strategies typical of writing. In a top-down approach, students can identify and classify the moves of written speech acts, and then insert relevant, plausible moves by hypothetical addressees, highlighting and the texts’ coherence. Learners can be shown that just as in dialogic-oral discourse the author’s moves are co-managed with the interactant on a moment-to-moment basis, in monologic-written discourse, too, the author’s moves can be micro-planned, i.e. constructed as sensible reacting moves to a hidden interlocutor’s covert prompts in a sort of “interior dialogue”