The learners’ stage of development

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Communicative strategies

     As anyone who has tried to communicate in an L2 knows, learners frequently experience problems in saying what they want to say because of their inadequate knowledge. If learners do not know a word in the target language they may “borrow” a word from their L1 or use another target‐language word that is approximate in meaning, or try to paraphrase the meaning of the word, or even construct an entirely new word. These strategies, with the obvious exception of those that are L1 based, are also found in the language use of native speakers.

     There have been a number of attempts to construct psycholinguistic models to account for the use of communication strategies. Claus Faerch and Gabriele Kasper, for example, proposed a model of speech production which involves a planning and an execution phase. Communication strategies are seen as part of the planning phase.They are called upon when learners experience some kind of problem with an initial plan which prevents them from executing it. They can either abandon the initial plan and develop an enterily different one by means of reduction strategy (such as switching to a different topic) or try to maintain their original communicative goal by adopting some kind of achievement strategy (such as L1 borrowing).

      As Selinker has pointed out, communication strategies constitute one of the processes responsible for learner errors. We might expect, therefore, that the choice of communication strategies will reflect the learners’ stage of development. For example, learners might expect to switch from L1‐based strategies to L2‐based strategies as their knowledge of the L2 develops. It would also be interesting to discover whether the use of communication strategies has any effect on L2 acquisition. For example, do learners notice the gap more readily as a result of having to use a communication strategy? Or does successful use of a communication strategy obviate the need for learners to pick out the correct target‐language forms?  

(ELLIS, Rod. Second Language Acquisition. Oxford University, 1997. P.60‐61. Adapted.)