An adjacency pair, 'Request - acceptance' and multiple functions of the desu/masu forms emerging in small talk: Using natural conversational data in Japanese language teaching

The chapter demonstrates the benefits of natural conversational data and how they can be integrated into Japanese language teaching. The BTSJ Natural Conversation Corpus released in 2017 (Usami 2017) provides a large volume of natural conversational data. The chapter analyses a long stretch of small talk from the corpus and reveals multiple functions of desu/masu forms and how an adjacency pair ‘request – acceptance’ is, in fact, stretched over many conversational turns. It also demonstrates how natural conversational data can be converted to meaningful teaching and learning materials. Natural Conversation Reconstruction Tasks (NCRT) are introduced and their intended learning outcomes are demonstrated together with their benefits.