Experimental Research On Communication Strategies

The ultimate purpose of language learning is to communicate and acquire communicative competence. Chinese Educational Ministry also advocated in 2004 "the aim of college teaching is to cultivate students' comprehensive capability, especially communicative competence both verbally and non-verbally". An essential approach to achieve this goal is to train learners' strategic competence, that is, to help learners use communication strategies (CSs), which is one important element of communicative competence. CSs were initiated by foreign scholars. They should not be copied or introduced indiscriminately, but be applied into Chinese teaching to find out our own suitable mode to guide teaching. However, the study of CSs is not adequate in China. Besides, to date the literature review, many foreign experts and scholars have conducted a lot of research on the definition and taxonomy of communication strategies both theoretically and empirically, which lay solid foundation for the further research in this field. Those researchers also suggest that some factors influencing the choice and efficient employment of CSs should be further studied. This research is just the further research on CSs.This thesis aims at finding out the factors that influence the utilization of CSs and exploring how to improve learners' communicative competence by using CSs efficiently. There are three hypotheses in this research: 1) the choice of CSs will vary with learners' L2 proficiency, communicative context, personality and task;2) when the L2 proficiency is available, communicative context and personality will influence the efficient employment of achievement strategies;3) mere must exist common qualities in the efficient employment of achievement strategies. There are 360 freshmen students as subjects, who were divided into three groups (top, middle and bottom) according to their different proficiency. This experiment consists of three stages: 1) the first stage — instruction stage, in which CSs are taught and trained so that all 360 students can acquire the related knowledge and recognition about CSs, meanwhile the factors affecting the choice of CSs can be found out;2) the second stage — association and practice stage, in which the experiment only concentrates on 80 top students who can use achievement strategies successfully (only achievement strategies can benefit the realization of communication goal) in order to find out when L2 proficiency is available, what are the factors that dramatically influence the efficient employment of achievement strategies;3) the third stage — autonomous production stage, in which the subjects are narrowed down to only 46 achievers who topped out from all the experiments in the hope of finding the common nature of successful employment ofachievement strategies. The data are collected from questionnaires, diaries, interview and tape-recording and put into computer for analysis by SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) software. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed for the purpose of making the result more objective and reliable.Results show that most students hold positive attitude to achievement strategies and negative attitude to reduction strategies. In communication, they have frequent tendency to choose achievement strategies to assist in conveying the meanings when communicating problem arose. However their choice and employment of CSs are greatly discouraged by some factors: 1) L2 proficiency, 2) communicative contexts, 3) personality, 4) task. Generally, subjects of higher L2 proficiency employ more achievement strategies, while subjects of very limited knowledge of target language are the most frequent users of reduction strategies. So do the extraverted subjects who employ more achievement strategies than the introverted. On the condition that the scope of the communicative content is within die subjects' comprehension, concrete task elicits more employment of concept-based strategies, such as, paralinguistic, cooperative etc. besides IL-based. In contrast, abstract task elicits more utilization of linguistic-based strategies — IL-based strategies. Basically, IL-based strategies are the first that are quite popular with the students of different L2 proficiency.The results provided some implications in foreign language teaching. CSs can compensate for the breakdown of deficient linguistic knowledge. L2 proficiency is the first premise to achieve communicative goal, however, successful employment of achievement strategies can dominate whether the communicative goal can be finally achieved. Now that CSs could contribute a lot to learners' communicative competence, teachers should incorporate strategies training into their teaching program in the effort to improve learners' strategic competence, and design as many diversities of communicative contexts as possible so as to make students gradually adapt to various communicative situations for the purpose of the subjects' reducing communicative stress, transferring the strategic competence successfully when real communication occurs and ultimately realizing the aim of strong communicative competence.