“Once I get stuck…” A study of communication strategies of undergraduate English language learners

Abstract

This study set out to examine communication strategies, the strategies that learners employ when they confront a problem in communication as they possess inadequate competence in presenting their ideas. It also explored the communication strategies produced by 1st and 4th year Arts students so as to compare the strategies of the two groups. A new communication strategy typology was created to facilitate the interpretation of the video-recorded data derived from a spoken corpus of 40 participants, who were asked to retell a provided Buddhist parable to their partner. The result from the findings was that the 1st year participants made use of all kinds of communication strategies, such as ‘code switching,’ ‘approximation,’ ‘partial borrowing’ as well as ‘non-linguistic strategies.’ However, the 4th year students did not utilize the strategies such as ‘literal translation’ and ‘word coinage,’ which might be likely to cause miscommunication. They tended to maintain the conversation in English and demonstrate the process of negotiation of meaning. Overall, the 4th year English majors produced more comprehensible and appropriate communication strategies than the 1st year students. In addition, the findings provided suggestions for English pedagogy to probably help less competent 1st year students express themselves in class and become less awkward when communicating in English.