A Survey Of PME’s Perception And Use Of CSs In Oral Communication

The efficient and proper English communicative ability contributes to the success of the learners, not only in classroom but also in every life phases, however, the English speaking ability is hard for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners to achieve and enhance. Because of various reasons, Chinese students’ oral communicative ability still cannot meet expectations, which concerns the scholars and teachers a lot. In order to accomplish appropriate and effective communication, Chinese learners need communication strategies to help them in real-life communication practices.Compared with native speakers, second language learners are more likely to encounter with communication problems. The communication strategies assist in keeping communication going on when the expression problems occur. The present study is preceded within the framework of researches of both communication competence and interlanguage. Considering communication competence’s great importance to language learning and teaching, strategic competence as one of its significant component, and the use of communication strategies is the most immediate and major reflection of strategic communication, a conclusion could be drawn that the use of communication strategies is one essential aspect of communication, that is, more importance should be put on communication strategies. Regarding to the dynamic system of interlanguage, the researcher makes a bold inference the use of communication strategies experiences the synchronous features as the interlanguage, like being sequential and phase-wise.This research attempts to investigate the Chinese postgraduates majoring in English’(PME) perception of the usefulness and use of communication strategies and their actual practice of CSs. In short, it aims to find out the current situation of the use of CSs among postgraduates majoring in English. And then, the differences and similarities of undergraduates’use and PME’s use of CSs are investigated.To accomplish the research goals, the theoretical and experimental work is carried out as follows:firstly, make a balanced and rational CSs selection to serve as the framework for next investigation, after reviewing the literature on CSs; secondly, employ three instruments, a questionnaire, oral tasks and interviews, to do the data collection and analysis.The findings and implications are expected not only to answer the research question in present study, but also to contribute, even slightly, to second language research. The results show the English-major postgraduates have got some understanding towards CSs and formed the awareness of using CSs in oral communication, by examining their perception of the effectiveness and self-use of CSs. From that, it is easy to notice that the CSs are inevitable for English-major postgraduates to address communication, however, the postgraduates still need in-depth and comprehensive understanding of CSs. PME’s use of CSs has a small amount of distinctive features of their own, but still sharing many similarities with the undergraduates’. Out of the strategies they use, some belong to non-fluent output, like self-repair, pause fillers and hesitations, some are taken as less effective or often being adopted by less advanced learners according previous scholars’researches.Most of all, the researcher of this study hopes to admonish the postgraduates of English major that their current use of CSs is not as good as expected, and that more attentions should be attached to CSs.