| The concept of communication strategies was coined by Selinker (1972) in Jnterlanguage to describe the sources of errors made by the second or foreign language learners. In Canale & Swain's ftamework of communicative competence, they regarded strategic competence as communication strategies, "verbal and non-verbal strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient competence" (Swain & Canale,1980:30). As one of the three components of communicative competence, communication strategies are particularly crucial to the foreign language learners, because they are the attempts to cope with imperfect knowledge, to handle breakdowns in communication, and to keep the communication channel open.This thesis reported a study ~vliicli ~vas based on the oral production of the English majors in Guangxi Normal University. The subjects in this study were sixty normal university' students. According to their general language proficiency, the subjects were divided into two groups: the high-proficiency group (thirty third-year undergraduates) and the low-proficiency group (thirty first-year undergraduates). The communicative task for this research was a lexis-identitication task. The subjects in both the HP group and the LP group worked in pairs: one was required to communicate one concrete concept and one abstract concept, without using the exact target ~vord. The other tried to make out ~vhat the lexical item was, according to his partner's performance. '[he whole process of the interaction was tape-recorded amid each section was reckoned by time for the qualitative and quantitative analysis.Results showed that Chinese learners of English did use a varietY of conlnlunicationstrategies to convey the meanings ~vhen communication problem arose. Four types of communication strategies were observed as linguistic-related strategies, concept-relatedIIIstrategies, avoidance strategies and paralinguistic strategies. Second, the abstract concepts elicited more communication strategies than the concrete concepts. More linguistic-related strategies were used to convey the abstract concepts than the other strategies. More concept-related strategies were used to communicate the concrete concepts. Third, the high-proficiency group tended to use more linguistic-related strategies, while the louproficiency group employed more concept-related strategies and avoidance strategies. There was no significant difference bet~veen the two groups in using the paralinguistic strategies. And fourth, the high-proficiency group was more efficient iii employing communication strategies to convey the ,iieaning than the low-proficiency group.By analyzing the results of the study, we found that certain factors would intluence the subjects' employment of coirimuaiication strategies. First, the communicative situation influenced the subjects' choice of communication strategies. The highly-controlled communicative situation of the present study, which required the subjects not to use Chinese~ in communication, eliminated the subjects' tendency to rely on LI-based strategies and cooperative strategies. Second, the problem-source influenced the subjects' employment of communication strategies. That's why the concrete concepts which are more easily described elicited more concept-related strategies than the abstract concepts. Third, the subjects' general language proficiency intluenced strategy employment. The high-proficiency subjects tended to use more linguistic-related strategies, which heavily relied on the subjects' linguistic knowledge. And the low-proficiency group, restricted by their liniited knowledge of target language, employed more concept-related strategies and avoidance strategies. Fourth, the subjects' language proficiency intluenced the effectiveness of strategy employment. The high-proficiency group, which had a higher proficiency level, was more efficient in using communication strategies to fulfill the task.The results sugg...
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