Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Avoidance strategies
These Faerch and Kasper divide into:
●
Formal avoidance. The speaker avoids a particular linguistic form, whether in
pronunciation, in morphemes or in syntax.
●
Functional avoidance. The speaker avoids different types of function.
Again, this approach, in general, reminds the teacher of the processes going on in
the students’ minds when they are trying to speak in a new language. Practice
Strategies for communicating and learning
108

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with communication techniques, such as information gap games, forces the stu-
dents to use these types of communication strategy, whether they want to or not,
provided that they have to say things that are just beyond their current level of
functioning in the second language.
Communication strategies 109
Box 6.1 Test of communication strategies
A
B
D
C
Figure 6.1 Describe either (i) A or B or (ii) C or D in writing, so that other people could
distinguish it from the other member of the pair (without, of course, being told ‘left’ or
‘right’). Then check against the types of strategies on page 112. Some examples of stu-
dents’ responses are given at the end of the chapter on page 120.
Compensatory strategies
To some extent, Tarone’s social communicative strategies and Faerch and Kasper’s
psychological strategies are complementary ways of coping with the problems of
communicating in a second language. But as we have seen, they end up as rather
long and confusing lists. Eric Kellerman and his colleagues (1987) feel that these
approaches can be considerably simplified. The common factor to all communica-
tion strategies is that the L2 learner has to deal with not knowing a word in a sec-
ond language; it is lack of vocabulary that is crucial. The strategies exist to plug gaps
in the learners’ vocabulary by allowing them to refer to things for which they do not
know the L2 words; a better name, then, is compensatory strategies – L2 learners
are always having to compensate for the limited vocabulary at their disposal.
Nanda Poulisse (1990) set up an experiment in which Dutch learners of English
had to carry out tasks such as retelling stories and describing geometrical shapes.
She ended up with a new division of strategies into two main types, called archis-
trategies, each with two subdivisions, according to the way that they coped with
words they did not know.