A Study Of Communication Strategies Employed By Chinese EFL Learners And Native-like Speakers Of English

Second and foreign language learning has been a major area of applied linguistic study whose aim is to facilitate the process of language learning. However, so far no single teaching method or linguistic theory can lead learners to attain such an ideal language proficiency as that of a native speaker of the target language. Chinese EFL teachers and researchers who were once bewildered by the question as to how to efficiently train learners' proficiency in English have gradually realized the significance of communication and the fact that the present dilemma is partly due to the insufficient attention that has been paid to language use. In recent years, greater and greater importance has been attached to communication in classroom language teaching and we have seen an enormous increase in the number of research works carried out on communication strategies, which are the means learners take to compensate for deficits in real communication. According to Canale and Swain (1980), communicative competence consists of three parts, they are grammatical competence, strategic competence and sciolinguistic competence. So the study on the nature and functions of communication strategies梩he specific device for realizing strategic competence梚s bound to be beneficial for the training of communicative competence.The present study begins with the literature review which is mainly concerned with communication strategies including some notions about second language acquisition, communicative competence, strategic competence and some theories about CSs related to the study. Then a small-scale experiment was carried out between two groups of speakers possessing differentiated language proficiency to explore their different use of CSs in two English speaking tasks. The significance of the study lies in that the comparison could throw light on how to cultivate learners' communicative competence by employing CSs when speakers encounter problems in communication. The results indicate that the type, frequency and effectiveness of communication strategies employed by the learners vary according to their proficiency level and the nature of tasks as well. These findings give strong support to our hypothesis that learners' communicative competence could probably be increased by develpment of their strategic competence.Based on the findings, some implications for our language teaching are suggested and advice is offered to strengthen learners' communicative competence. Undoubtedly, due to several reasons, there are some limitations in either the design of the study or the specific analysis of the findings and problems which this study has failed to resolve and hence require further study.