Category: Discourse Series

School of Foreign Languages in Athens & Online

Conversational English and Speaking Skills Development

R is for Relevance

This may have happened to you, too. You are in a desperate hurry to get on with something and  your friend, sister, husband or boss, start rabbiting on about completely unconnected things, like details of the traffic, the clothes someone wore or his relationships etc. You think: “Get to the point!!!” Watch this experiment – the…
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T is for Turntaking

If you turn on Greek TV during a talk show, interview, or even some sitcom, you will note that Greeks do interrupt each other frequently and freely, so much so, that it’s sometimes impossible to follow what anyone of them is actually saying.  But they are not the only ones – watch this video…. Surprised?…
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G is for Genre

Definition  Genre ( /ˈʒɑːnrə/ or /ˈdʒɑːnrə/; from French, genre French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ʁ], “kind” or “sort”, from Latin: genus (stem gener-), Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are…
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N is for New Information

What is New information in a sentence? Some definitions Chafe (1976) defines given information as “that knowledge which the speaker assumes to be in the consciousness of the addressee at the time of the utterance,” while new information is defined as “what the speaker assumes he is introducing into the addressee’s consciousness by what he…
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