A Contrastive Study Of The Use Of Communication Strategies By College English Majors

Strategic competence is a part of communicative competence. Language learners'strategic competence largely determines the learners'fluency and conversational skills in the target language. Mastery of this competence includes the mastery of communication strategies(CS) which generally refer to the means that speakers use to solve their communicative problems. Most researches on communication strategies have focused on the identification and taxonomy of the learners' CS in target language communication without providing a link between the learners'use of these strategies and their levels of target language proficiency. Investigation of learners' CS use within the framework of language proficiency may provide a good understanding of how a shift in the learners'level of target language would affect their use of CS. In the meantime, such study may shed some light on the construct of language proficiency itself and its complex constituents. This study attempts to examine the relationship between learners'CS use and their target language proficiency through the cross-sectional and longitudinal data collected from one class of 30 second-year English majors. The findings of this study show that learners of different levels of target language proficiency differ in their preference of CSs in speaking and writing. Generally speaking, the less proficient learners would like to turn to reduction strategies while the more proficient ones more frequently turn to achievement strategies. This study also shows that a shift in a learner's level of proficiency would affect his use of CS. The more proficient a learner becomes, the less reduction strategies he would use.This thesis consists of four chapters. In the Introduction part, the significance and objectives of this study are presented. Chapter one reviews the theories about communication competence, strategic competence, and communication strategies proposed by linguists such as Tarone, Hymes, Canale and Swain, along with the previous case studies that is related to the author's research. Chapter two provides detailed descriptions of the experiment design. In Chapter three, the data collected from the experiment are processed by computer and analyzed, and the findings are discussed. According to these findings, in Chapter four, pedagogical implications for cultivating learners'communicative competence are presented. In the conclusion part the author summarizes the findings of the study, discusses the significance of these findings, and points out two limitations of the study.