An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Communication Strategy Training In Chinese ESL Classroom

This thesis reports an experimental study of a communication strategy(CS) training in Chinese EFL classroom.It adopts the pretest-posttest experimental design with 54 English-major freshmen as its subjects.The treatment for the present study is an 8-week-long communication strategy training,and the instruments are questionnaires, oral tests and interviews.Before the experiment,a questionnaire and an oral performance pretest were conducted to ensure no significant differences between the experimental group(EG) and the control group(CG) in their communicative proficiency in English and their knowledge of CSs.After the experiment,a questionnaire,oral performance tests and a semi-structured interview were conducted as posttests so as to find out the effects of the strategies training in terms of the subjects' gains in their CS awareness,assumed use of the CSs,and their actual use of the CSs in the oral production.In addition,this study also explores the correlation between the English proficiency and the CS use,and the correlation between personality type and the CS use.The major findings are as follows:1.The EG outperformed the CG in the CS awareness and CS use.EG used much more communication strategies than CG.Their communicative strategy awareness and competence have been promoted after instruction and training. They have made great progress in the strategy competence in the posttest.2.The EG outperformed the CG in their oral performance.The discourse length of EG was much longer than CG and their scores were also much higher.3.There's no significant correlation between English proficiency and the EFL learners' CS use. 4.There's no significant correlation between personality type and the EFL learners' CS use.The findings of the present study shed lights into EFL teaching in China.First, teachers should integrate explicit CS training into the routine teaching plans so as to raise EFL learners' awareness and enhance their oral performance;second,a series of strategy-based activities are needed so as to ensure the automaticity from the CS awareness to effective CS use.