Everyone knows that we use language for a variety of purposes, for communication in the broadest sense: to convey to others what we have in our minds, not only information but also thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions; to establish and maintain human relationships and gain the sympathy and support to others; to carry on conversations, both trivial and serious; to obtain goods and services and to get things done; in short, to carry on neatly all the ordinary and extraordinary business of life.
However foreign language learners who venture to put their knowledge into practice often run into communication problems due to a deficient foreign language vocabulary store. “The strategies which they employ to solve these linguistic problems are generally know as communication strategies (CS).” (Quote from Problems and solutions in the classification of compensatory strategies) Conscious communication strategies are used by an individual to overcome the crisis which occurs when language structures are inadequate to convey the individual’s thought. (Tarone, 1997, p.195) Language problems and difficulties are a salient part of communication in a L2 and problem-management occurs at several levels. No wonder “communication strategies,” seen as the language devices used to handle communication problems, have been the target of much research during the past two decades.
It is believed that learners can improve communicative proficiency by developing an ability to use specific communication strategies that enable them to compensate for their target language deficiency. Communication strategies are generally subdivided into: (a) avoidance or reduction strategies, used by the speaker who give up (part of) his message; and (b) achievement strategies which speaker employs to reach his originally intended goal. The latter have been further subdivided into retrieval strategies and compensatory strategies.
The following categories were classified as achievement strategies: help-seeking, modified interaction, modified output, time-gaining, maintenance, and self-solving strategies. The help-seeking strategies were of two types: an appeal for help and asking for repetition. The former was used when seeking an interlocutor’s assistance in solving problems caused by the lack of target language knowledge. The latter was used when the participant did not hear or understand what the partner had said. The modified interaction strategy was the process whereby the students sent signals for negotiation in order to overcome communication difficulties.
This process included confirmation checks, comprehension checks, and clarification requests. Confirmation checks are used to confirm that the speaker has understood something correctly. Comprehension checks are used to see if the listener has understood correctly. Clarification requests ask for an explanation when the speaker does not entirely comprehend something. When using Modified Output Strategies, the participants rephrased an utterance in response to their conversation partners’ signals for negotiation. The students were given opportunities to produce specific grammar points in creative and complex ways when speaking in the target language, which could lead them to improve their interlanguage.
When the speakers had difficulties expressing an idea, they used time-gaining to give themselves time to think and to keep the communication channel open. The conscious use of fillers such as “Well, let me see…” and filled pauses such as “Oh…” enabled them to keep the conversation going. Maintenance strategies consisted of two types: providing active response and shadowing. The former entailed making positive comments or using other conversation gambits such as “I know what you mean” and “Sounds good.” The latter type presented exact, partial, or expanded repetitions of the interlocutor’s preceding utterance in order to show the listeners’ understanding of important issues.
When the learners encountered difficulties caused by their own insufficient linguistic resources, they used self-solving strategies to solve the problems without their interlocutor’s help. They tried to find relevant linguistic items or expressions by using paraphrase, approximation, and restructuring.
The following strategies were categorized as reduction strategies: message abandonment strategies, first-language-based strategies, interlanguage-based reduction strategies, and false starts. The students used Message Abandonment Strategies to avoid engaging in communication when they faced problems in the target language. First-Language-Based Strategies consisted of interjections in Chinese for a lexical item when the learner experienced communication difficulties.
The students occasionally used Chinese either intentionally or unintentionally. When the learners faced communication problems due to a lack of linguistic resources, they sometimes coped by using their interlanguage system to reduce intended utterances and avoided using certain language structures or specific topics. By cutting out some intended elements, they occasionally produced inappropriate word order based on their interlanguage system. False starts referred to occasions in the conversational discourse when the learners ran into difficulties in executing their utterance and repeated one or more of the preceding words.
Given that EFL learners frequently face language difficulties during their communication in English, they have no choice but to use strategies to compensate for their lack of proficiency in order to facilitate their interaction. The nature of these strategies and the frequency of their use depend to some degree both on specific classroom contexts and on student proficiency levels. Therefore, it is important to assess carefully their strategy use in actual learning events and then to choose appropriate strategies for pedagogical purposes.
The research respectively investigated the general situation about the using of oral communication strategies of college English major students and their communicative proficiency by the methods of questionnaire survey, and spoken English test, and on the basis of which, further studied the correlation between the using of communication strategies and the factors comprising communicative proficiency and the general level of their communicative proficiency.
The use of specific strategies plays an important role in learning the target language. It has also been suggested that learners’ communicative proficiency can be improved by developing strategies for communication. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that raising learners’ awareness of strategies that they might use to solve potential communication problems could develop their communicative proficiency.
This research investigated how students with high or low speaking ability chose their Oral Communication Strategies. The findings indicate that the students chose some specific strategies significantly improved their oral test scores as compared to the students who did not use the strategies.
So we can conclude that it is important to introduce for future curriculum development specific strategy training that focuses on raising learners’ awareness of some positive strategies.
The second language proficiency/achievement is related to language learning strategies (Bremner, 1999; Oxford, 1989). All language learners use certain types of language learning strategies to a certain level, but there are differences in the frequency and choice of use among different learners (Chamot & Kupper, 1989). It appears that successful language learners have the ability to orchestrate and combine particular types of language learning strategies in effective ways according to their own learning needs (Oxford, 1990). Thus, to facilitate the learners’ language learning and to promote learner autonomy, language learning strategy is a key point for instructors to pay attention to.
The results of statistical analyses will indicate that there is a significant and positive relationship between learners who using oral English communication strategies and their communicative proficiency. In oral communication successful EFL learners employed certain strategies that less successful learners did not employ. EFL learners who use strategies can lead to improvements in oral communication ability. The high oral proficiency learners will report more use of some certain categories of strategies than the low oral proficiency learners.
The research was conducted within college-level English speaking comprehension classes at two large universities in Guizhou. Two instruments were used to collect data in this study: One of them was a questionnaire on oral English communication strategies.
The questionnaire consisted of 32 items such as “When I am speaking English, I pay attention to…, ,” “When I am listening to other people speaking English, I try to . ..,” and “What helps me most when I communicate with others is . . . .” These items were designed to elicit a variety of strategies for oral communication. These items were developed into a Likert-type questionnaire that asked students to report the frequency with which they used certain strategies in oral communication. The students were asked to read a statement and decide if they: (1) strongly disagree (2) moderately disagree (3) slightly disagree (4) moderately agree (5) strongly agree.
The questionnaire was administered during the last 2 weeks of the first semester at two universities. Students completed the questionnaire during the lecture periods, within 20 minutes. General instructions were announced, including how to answer the question items. All questionnaires were given out and collected by the instructors responsible for the oral English courses. The students answered the questionnaire with some demographical questions, including Name, Age.
All these were added to both of them for the sake of latter tests, and in order to clarity they were instructed to provide answers to all the questions. For the reasons of anonymity and confidentiality, students were advised that their identities would be removed from the questionnaire and the test (by the researcher) prior to data analysis and they would be assigned a code number to protect the students’ privacy.
By using this questionnaire, I investigated the oral English communication strategies of Chinese EFL students in oral English communication. This questionnaire consisted of three parts: student perceptions of useful strategies for improving their speaking abilities, frequency of strategy use for oral communication, and student selection of techniques for language learning tasks.
The other one was a test. All students were asked to complete a simulated conversation test. This task was similar to daily classroom activities. In this task, the students imagined they were travelling alone in a foreign country and were prompted by a hypothetical situation involving arranging a trip at a travel agency. Test takers were given the role of a customer (Role A) and an interviewer, who was a class teacher, became a conversation partner as the travel agent (Role B). The students were given 5 minutes to prepare the task and then they engaged in a simulated conversation derived from the situation described in English on the card. The simulated conversation was individually administered. No assessment was carried out during their conversation; instead, the interaction was recorded on videotape.
The students speaking test grades are used as the students’ communicative proficiency level. The current research used the Oral Communication Assessment Scale for Japanese EFL, which had been established by an action research project at the university (Nakatani, 2002, 2005). This scale consists of seven different levels and focuses on a learner’s fluency, ability to interact with an interlocutor, and flexibility for developing dialogue. Two independent native speakers of English were assigned to score this scale. Neither of them was an interviewer in the tests. Each rater was asked to watch the video of the task and to score each student’s conversational performance. The raters were not given any information about the English proficiency of the participants, so there was no halo effect.
Sixty one undergraduate EFL learners learning English for a BA degree consented to participate in the current study. Of 61 students, 28 students were studying at the Guiyang Normal University and, 33 students were studying at the University of Guizhou. All of the participants were English major freshmen, with intermediate level, whose ages ranged between 18 and 23. Also each student had completed 6 years of English study prior to entering the college. None of them had any experience studying abroad. From 61 students, 18 were male and 43 were female. 5. 000000
As it was mentioned in the section of instrumentation, one questionnaire on the students “Oral Communication Strategy Inventory” were used for collecting data in the current study.
The sample population in this study consists of 61 university students who major in English in Guizhou. The researcher went to the classes, explained the purpose of the study and the instructions, and asked if there were any questions or concerns. After distributing the questionnaires, the researcher gathered the responses and used Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for Windows, a statistical program, for data analysis. All unusable questionnaires, i.e. those which were either incomplete or where instructions were not followed, were identified and discarded.
