Learning Listening: The challenge of unscripted language

On the surface of it, unscripted language is a total mess, and it's a wonder that anybody can understand any of it. It stops and starts, interrupts and stumbles, slows and accelerates, and generally breaks all the grammar rules you’ve ever learnt. So, how can we help learners to make sense of it?
Well, help may be at hand from the field of conversation analysis, where we find that there is order underlying the apparent anarchy. In this talk I will suggest that, by classifying features of spontaneous speech according to whether they are speaker-generated, listener-oriented or interaction-driven, we will have a useful framework with which we can devise listening activities and guide our learners.