Psycholinguistic Factors In Communication Strategy Use

In the past twenty years or so, research emphasis in the field of SLA has shifted. Linguists and researchers are becoming more interested in the study of the learning process than the learning product, in the behavior of learners than that of teachers, in the development of communicative competence than that of linguistic competence. The study of communication strategies can be considered a result of these shifts of emphasis as it reveals not only learners" psychological processes of target language communication. hut also indicates their levels of communicative competence and. as such, it has received particular attention from linguists and researchers. Various definitions, frameworks and taxonomies of communication strategies have been proposed, and original and exciting findings have been reported.In the process of communication strategy research, different researchers take different research methods. The commonly taken approaches are linguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Resulted from the different perspectives, there are a number of controversies and arguments of terminology, classification, teachability and so on.Factors influencing CS use has been one of the focuses since the beginning of CS research. Researchers holding differentperspectives show us different factors. Based on the psycholinguistic approach, the present thesis attempts to find out what psycholinguistic factors there are in CS use. Generally, the psycholinguistic variables fall into two groups ?the cognitive factors such as cognitive ability and cognitive style and the affective factors such as personality and motivation.Considerable meaningful work has been done on some of the factors, however, much more research needs to be conducted on some others. Furthermore, the conclusions drawn till now are far from being satisfactory. Nevertheless, after years of study, many of the theoretical problems have been settled and meaningful implications may be drawn for practical teaching.