Teaching Learners to Exchange Information over Telephone

This article is devoted to the problem of raising learners’ awareness of exchanging information over the telephone. The paper highlights the results of analysing the specific features of the organisation of the telephone conversation for exchanging information. It presents a brief summary of skills and knowledge needed for telephone conversation and discourse analysis of this kind of conversation. Moreover, cognitive (familiarity with the topic, genre and interlocutors and processing demands), affective (feeling towards the topic and / or participants and self-consciousness) and performance (absence of eye-contact, gestures, possibility to monitor interlocutor’s responses, degree of collaboration, discourse control, environmental conditions and time pressure) factors are discussed in the article. The activities aimed at raising learners’ awareness of a telephone conversation process to exchange information are given with rationale and methodological support.