The Effects Of Problem Sources And Target Language Proficiency On Communication Strategies Employed By Normal University Non-English Majors

The employment of communication strategy, an important way to help learners improve their communicative competence, is often used by language learners in their oral communication to compensate their linguistic deficiency and help enhance the effectiveness of their communication. Normal university students are trained to teach in schools and institutions across the country in the future. The improvement of their awareness of the function of communication strategies and the cultivation of their communicative strategic competence will be of vital significance to both themselves and the English language teaching at different levels throughout China.By means of a contrastive study targeted the non-English major undergraduates in Guangxi Normal University, this thesis surveys the employment of communication strategies by the subjects in their oral communication,the effects of problem sources and target language proficiency on the learners'employment of communication strategies, with an aim to find out some possible effective ways to help improve the communicative competence of the non-English major undergraduates in the universities the under-developed areas in China.This thesis is divided into five chapters:Chapter 1 is an introduction to the origin of communication strategies and their theoretical and practical implications.Chapter 2 reviews the researches on communication strategies and the chief academic achievements both at home and abroad.Chapter 3 is the core of the thesis presenting the objectives, contents and procedures of this project. The subjects participated in the field test were 80 non-English majors undergraduates from Guangxi Normal University, who were divided into a high-proficiency group and low-proficiency one with 40 subjects each (twenty boys and twenty girls) with their performance in CET-4 (College English Test, Band 4) as a yardstick. However, only the performance of the initial speakers utilizing various strategies to make understood their original ideas and to achieve a successful oral communication has been dealt with while their interlocutors'responses were recorded but not analyzed. The content of this project includes: 1. a taxonomy of communication strategies employed by the subjects; 2. the relationship between the problem sources and the subjects'employment of communication strategies; 3. the...