Complaints: Sample Teaching Materials
Indirect Complaints(Boxer & Pickering, 1995, pp. 52-55 [©])
- Present and discuss indirect complaint sequences taken from spontaneous speech.
- Typical responses to complaints and responses (agreement, reassurance or commiseration)
- Advice responses that serve to encourage the speaker
- Joking and teasing responses that demonstrate light-hearted goodwill
- Question responses to show interest in the speaker’s complaint
- Commiseration responses in exclamatory form
- Present sample complaints without responses and encourage discussion on how each complaint makes students feel.
- Ask students to fill in the indirect complaint that might come before the following responses. For each of such complaint exchanges, have a group discussion about how setting, context, and interlocutor variables affect how people complain and respond.
- Ask students to arrange short conversations in order.
- Give the context of a situation with gender, social status, social distance relationships, and have small groups play roles of mini-drama, videotape, play back and analyze the interactions.
(SeeBoxer 1995for details and examples of this plan.)
References
Boxer, D. & Pickering L. (1995).Problems in the presentation of speech acts in ELT materials: the case of complaints.ELT Journal, 49(1), 44-58.
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