A Survey On Chinese College English Learners' Use Of Oral Communication Strategies

One of the most important purposes of foreign language learning is for communication, so how to cultivate and improve learners' communicative competence becomes a major concern of many researchers and foreign languge teachers. When people involve themselves in foreign languge communication, due to the limited linguistic knowledge, they often resort to roundabout ways to reach their communicative goals. In other words, they employ various communication strategies (CSs) to bridge the gap between their insufficient linguistic knowledge and communicative intentions. Then it is obvious that CSs play a crucial role in the development of learners' communicative competence.Over the past few decades, Western researchers have made great achievement in the study of CSs, while in China research in this field is still inadequate, especially when it comes to empirical studies. In view of this kind of situation, the author of the present study attempts to make further investigation into Chinese college English learners' use of CSs, and it is necessary to point out that CSs can be used to handle problems at all linguistic levels (i.e., phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic). The present study only focuses on CSs that are used to cope with lexical problems. The reasons of such focus are that lexis plays a central role in communication and learners seem to encounter more lexical difficulties.The present study aims at investigating the typical sorts of CSs adopted by Chinese college English learners and examining the main differences that might exist in the use of CSs between high-proficiency and low-proficiency learners.In the present study, college English learners were chosen as subjects and the research instruments used were questionnaire, oral tasks, and retrospective interview. The data obtained were analyzed with SPSS 11.5.The results of the present study are as follows:(1) Chinese college English learners employ almost the same sorts of CSs as Western researchers found in their researches. When lacking the appropriate words to express their intended meanings, they adopt various achievement strategies such as substitution, circumlocution, literal translation, etc. In addition, they use some reduction strategies such as message abandonment, topic avoidance and semantic reduction. However, they differ themselves from Western learners by the frequent use of repetition strategy and the seldom use of paralinguistic strategies.(2) There exist significant differences in the frequency and types of CSs between high-proficiency learners and low-proficiency ones. To be more specific, the CSs employed by low-proficiency learners significantly outnumber those adopted by high-proficiency learners; low-proficiency learners are inclined to employ reduction strategies and L1-based strategies, while high-proficiency learners rely more on achievement strategies especially L2-based strategies.Based on the major findings of the present study, the implications for foreign language learning, teaching and testing and the suggestions for future research are presented.