An Empirical Study On The Use Of Oral Communication Strategies By Business English Majors

Communication strategies(CSs) are considered as some techniques the language users adopt in order to achieve the communicative goal when they become aware of communication problems(CPs). Many researches show that strategic competence is one of the important components of communicative competence, so it is imperative to study the CSs for improving the communicative competence. It has been nearly forty years since the study on the second language CSs was carried out. The scope of CSs researches is always found in oral communication and most of these researches are concerned with the framework, influencing factors, teachability and effectiveness of CSs; however, these researches are conducted in the context of general second language, and seldom of them touch upon the field of ESP(English for Specific Purpose). Business English(BE) is an important branch of ESP, which is based on the business context and puts an emphasis on the development of students’ English communication skills and ability in international business environment. In the field of BE, the researches on CSs are far more rare.Considering this research gap, the current study regards the BE majors as research subjects to explore their CSs use in oral communication. Specifically, the present study examines BE majors’ perception to CSs and CPs in oral communication, then explores the frequency of CSs use by BE majors in oral communication and the influencing factors of CSs choice, such as gender, language proficiency. The study also investigates the oral CPs BE majors encounter in BE context. Finally, the correlation between oral CSs and oral CPs are examined. The major instrument of the present study is questionnaire, the design of which is mainly based on previous studies on CSs classification of famous scholars Tarone,F?rch and Kasper etc. The raw data are collected from 144 BE majors of grade three from School of Business and School of Economics and Finance in Xi’an International Studies University and analyzed by SPSS 18.0.Major findings indicate that the majority of BE majors often encounter problems in communicating in English and they have hardly ever heard and received the training of CSs in class; the most frequently used CSs in oral communication of BE majors are avoidance strategy and stalling strategy and the least one is achievement strategy; the first two biggest oral CPs encountered by all BE majors in BE context are deficiency of professional business knowledge and deficiency of communication skills in BE context; avoidance strategy has significant and positive correlations with most of oral CPs, indicating that the more oral CPs the students have, the more frequently they use avoidance strategy. Therefore, the BE majors are strategically unskilled in oral communication. Furthermore, both oral CSs and oral CPs vary in terms of gender and language proficiency.Based on these findings, the present study discusses the theoretical and pedagogical implications, which definitely shed light on the future researches.