An Experiment Research On Teaching Of Communication Strategies To Chinese Middle School Students

Nowadays strategic competence is a vital part of English foreign language learners'communicative competence, and it is regarded the ability to use communicative strategies: verbal and non-verbal strategies that may be used to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient competence. As one of the components of communicative competence, communicative strategies are particularly crucial to Chinese foreign language learners, because they are attempts to cope with imperfect knowledge, to handle breakdowns in communication, and to keep communication channels open.This paper reports an experiment research on the teaching of three communicative strategies: (1 ) topic avoidance/replacement(2)circumlocution(3)stalling device to 102 Chinese middle school students in the classroom. Research results show that learners'use of some communicative strategies increased through one-term training class instruction. Apart from this, communicative strategy also makes contributions to the development of oral English fluency to some extent. Our question survey finds 81.5 % of the students in the experiment hold favorable attitudes towards the training of communicative strategies. Hence, the teachability of specific communication strategies is validated.