The Relationship Between The Use Of Communication Strategies And Oral Communicative Competence Of College Students

In recent years,oral English teaching has drawn great attention from many experts and scholars,our society requests college students to break away from mute English more and more urgently.The task of oral English teaching is to foster expressive and communicative competence of oral English;which is that students can make proper conversation on the normal scene of daily life,interact with each other and make successive statements on the materials that they heard or familiar with."College English teaching plan" prescribed that language test shall focus on testing language proficiency and communicative competence of the students,accuracy and fluency.There exists a problem worth probing:through year-long English study, students have accumulated solid foundation,but they made little progress in oral English,why can't students apply what they learned to practice? Some relevant research shows that students' language proficiency doesn't match with oral communicative competence,effective use of communication strategies can generate significant effect on compensating for limited linguistic resources,avoiding failures in communication and improving their oral communicative competence.Communication strategic competence refers to the competence that communicators apply verbal or nonverbal means to overcome communicative difficulties caused by deficiency of linguistic knowledge(Canale & Swain:1980).There is close relation between communication strategic competence and oral communicative competence.In order to test the relationship between communication strategies and oral communicative competence,the author conducted an experiment.Two classes taught by the author herself were chosen in this experiment,one class is freshmen in the Math Department,and the other class is sophomores in the Administrative Department.First,a questionnaire was made,and the author found that students' use and understanding of communication strategies was quite limited,and knew the strategies they used frequently.Then the author carried out a three months' training on the freshmen in Math class,from the results got from pre-oral English test and post-oral English test,the author found that the score of freshmen exceed that of the sophomores.This research further testified that communication strategy training and fostering students' awareness of using communication strategies can improve oral communicative competence effectively.So the author advised to apply communicative strategies training to foreign language teaching process,and encourage students to deal with the difficulties occurred in communication,hence to improve oral communicative competence effectively.