Socioaffective Strategies
Cooperation
Question for Clarification
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Working with one or more peers to obtain feedback,
pool information, or model a language
activity
Asking a teacher or other native speaker for repetition, paraphrasing, explanation, and/or example
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Communication Strategies
While learning strategies deal with the receptive domain of intake, memory, storage, and recall, communication strategies pertain to the employment of verbal or nonverbal mechanisms for the productive communication of information. In the arena of linguistic interaction, it is sometimes difficult, of course, to distinguish between the two, as Tarone (1983) aptly noted, since comprehension and production can occur almost simultaneously. Nevertheless, as long as one can appreciate the slipperiness of such a dichotomy, it remains a useful distinction in understanding the nature of strategies, especially for pedagogical purposes.
The speculative early research of the 1970s (Varadi 1973 and others) has now led to a great deal of recent attention to communication strategies (see, for example, McDonough 1999; Dornyei 1995; Rost & Ross 1991; Bialystokl 1990a; Bongaerts & Poulisse 1989; Oxford &Crookall 1989). Some time ago, Faerch and Kasper (1983a) defined communication strategies as "potentially conscious plans for solving what to an individual presents itself as a problem in reaching a particular communicative goal." While the research of the last decade does indeed focus largely on the compensatory nature of communication strategies, more recent approaches seem to take a more positive view of communication strategies as elements of an overall strategic competence in which learners bring to bear all the possible facets of their growing competence in order to send clear messages in the second language. Moreover, such strategies may or may not be "potentially conscious"; support for such a conclusion comes from observations of first language acquisition strategies that are similar to those used by adults in second language learning contexts (Bongaerts & Poulisse 1989).
Perhaps the best way to understand what is meant by communication strategy is to look at a typical list of such strategies. Illustration - 6 offers a taxonomy that reflects accepted categories over several decades of research (adapted from Dornyei 1958).
Dornyei's classification is a good basis for some further comments on communication strategies. We will elaborate here on a few of the categories.
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