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This paper reports on the use of computer-mediated conversation within a wider online project on vocabulary development called ADELEX -"Assessing and Developing Lexical Competence" (R&D project, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, Ref: BFF2003-02561). Traditionally, the teaching of conversation has concentrated on an indirect approach in which "conversational competence is seen as the product of engaging learners in conversational interaction" (Richards, 1990: 76-77). This approach clearly focuses on fluency and leads "learners to explore creatively ways of expressing themselves" (Bygate, 2001: 19) through communicative activities such as debates, role-plays, etc. However, with the emergence of speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), language functions began to be identified and instead of focusing on lexico-grammatical patterns it was adopted a more functional approach with the attempt to make learners sound more culturally appropriate. This leads to a growing interest in a more "direct" approach, emphasizing learners' awareness towards the correct use of speech acts (or language functions). Thus the first part of this paper provides a framework for analyzing speech acts or "functions of language" paying special attention to their pedagogy. The second part presents a data driven learning (DDL) approach promoted to achieve "the ability to see patterning in the target language and to form generalizations" (Johns, 1991: 2). By means of BNC Indexer (Moreno, 2000) and a powerful concordancer, such as Wordsmith Tools, we have created a small-scale corpus of face-to-face spontaneous conversations to investigate the most common patterns of speech acts ranging from assertive to unmarked and tentative. Finally, the third part is an attempt to implement some DDL activities in the ESL classroom arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]