A Study Of Oral Communication Strategies By Learners Of Chinese As A Foreign Language

Communicative competence has always been a major focus in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) since the last decade. Communicative competence is composed of grammatical, discoursal, sociolinguistic and strategic competence. Among them, however, the communication strategies (CSs) have not received much attention.The study of CS by L2 speakers dates back to Selinker's work on interlanguage in 1972. He accounted for CSs as a by-product of the attempt of the learner to express his meaning in spontaneous speech with an inadequate grasp of the target language system. CSs are different from the social strategies in cross-culture communication, and the strategies of speech act realization in pragmatics.Although the study of CSs began over 30 years ago, studies from the perspective of TCFL seem to be lacking. For that purpose, this research tries to make a theoretical and pedagogical study in this area.Firstly, the study reviews the theoretical literature of CSs, and dwells on its theoretical framework, including the definitions, various classifications, relationship with other concepts, characterizes and the contextual markers.Secondly, it makes a quantitative study of the use of CSs on the basis of the data taken from questionnaires done by more than 200 students learning Chinese as a foreign language in the Overseas Education College of Xiamen University, and from task-based oral descriptions of pictures of objects given by 40 Filipino students of Chinese origin.Based on the results of a quantitative analysis of the questionnaires and oral work, the study shows that learners with different language proficiency levels employ different kinds of CSs, and perform differently in speaking partly due to their employment of CSs. In addition, it reveals that the use of CSs can be influenced by such factors as the languages or dialects used to communicate with family members, the age and gender of the learners, and there is also a significant high correlation between the use of CSs and the effectiveness of oral production.Lastly, these findings strongly support that learners'oral communicative competence could probably be increased by developing their CSs. The study also provides some suggestions to the training of CSs in TCFL.