Background

Improving students' communicative competence is usually an aim of many, if not most, EFL teachers and EFL researchers and it has been recognized that students learning a second language need to develop communicative strategies to help them overcome or compensate for the inevitable breakdowns in communication occur.

With this in mind, this "Basic English Conversation Course" and a section of the General Education Speaking-Writing class at a university in Japan were designed to give students the tools to interrupt, ask questions, give verbal and non-verbal signs they understood or didn't understand, to ask questions for meaning, and to rephrase and describe vocabulary all in a manner taking into account the social situation in which the conversation was taking place. Learning to recognize social register was also an important part of the course.