This paper describes an upper level foreign language course designed to enable students to "learn about conversation" as both a universal and culture-specific form of talk, and to "learn to converse" at an advanced level and in culturally appropriate ways with speakers of French from France and Francophone countries. Students explore both universal and culture-specific features of social conversation, such as listening behavior, selection and shifting of topic, interruption, and overlap. In order to improve communicative skills in French, students learn the technique of conversational shadowing (Murphey, 2001) and practice various forms of response in conversational interaction. This work in theory and practice culminates in the planning and carrying out of a "real-world" conversation hour (Kaplan, 1997) hosted by students in the course for a variety of native speakers of French in the undergraduate institution and surrounding community. An important objective is to foster students' critical reflection about cultural aspects of communication in all languages, including their own. In addition, the course aims to provide the practice and interaction which are indispensable to conversational fluency and culturally appropriate communication in a foreign language. Examples of short exercises in which one speaker takes up through selective repetition what another has said and responds are appended. (Contains 2 footnotes.)[This paper was published in: Proceedings of Intercultural Competence Conference August, 2010, Vol. 1, pp.182-194.]