Achieving communicative competence in a foreign language seems to be a difficult process for many language learners. The communication process has several facets, many of them being culturally preconditioned. In order to communicate successfully, foreign language learners have to ‘access’ a given country’s culture, and this can be done be understanding and to a certain degree even adopting the rituals present in this culture, among them communication strategies, styles and patterns. Yet, those rituals are seldom explicit enough for language learners to master without a longer stay in the given country. Indeed, even having spent a considerable amount of time in the country does not “guarantee” a communicative success. Investigating the cultural preconditions of the oral communication process seems therefore to be a necessity when one wants to facilitate achieving communicative competence in a foreign language classroom. As Horbowicz (in press) showed, Norwegian as a foreign language textbooks very seldom deal with cultural preconditions of Norwegian oral communication. Moreover, the dialogues presented in the textbooks are often contrived, and not close to real life conversations. Norwegian as a foreign language learners are left alone in the attempt to achieve communicative competence through the method of trial and error. There is therefore a need for further research on the topic of Norwegian oral communication. This paper will present the results of an analysis of recorded dyadic conversations between Polish and Norwegian native speakers in Norwegian. The analysed features include those previously identified, on the basis on existing literature, as standard Norwegian linguistic conversational practices. The purpose of this analysis is to show how non-native language speakers use those practices in achieving communicative goals. The collected conversational data will be additionally compared with data consisting of conversations between Norwegians (the Oslo corpus of spoken Norwegian), in order to verify the hypotheses. However, discovering language specific – or “culturally contexted”, as Moerman (1988) prefers to call them – features of oral communication is just one step on the way to facilitating acquisition of communicative competence. Another step needs to be taken by foreign language researchers and teachers, and that means implementing knowledge about oral communication into language teaching. In my paper I will review Kaplan’s (1997) and other models for communicative training in a foreign language classroom, and try to adapt the models to use with Norwegian language.

Since the data used for analysis are recorded conversations between Polish and Norwegian native speakers, the main methodology adopted in the paper is conversation analysis (CA). The analysis is based on the transcripts of whole conversations. In my paper I will show data examples of language specific features of Norwegian conversations. I will then suggest how those features could be presented in teaching materials, and which methods could be used for training ‘real life conversations’ in a foreign language classroom.

Among the expected outcomes of the paper are: 1. investigating the usefulness of analysing second language conversational data for determining culture-specific features of oral communication; 2. suggesting possible improvements of foreign language teaching methods and materials so that the learners are better prepared for participating in real life conversational activities; A further goal is to present an outline of a course in Norwegian oral communication, aimed predominantly at students studying Norwegian outside Norway.