Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

6.1 Communication strategies
●
How would you explain to someone the type of nut you need to repair 
your car? Would your strategy be different in your first or second 
language?
●
Should students have to talk about things for which they do not know the
words or should they always have the vocabulary available to them?
Focusing question
communication strategies can be:
●
mutual attempts to solve L2 communication problems by participants (Tarone,
1980)
●
individual solutions to psychological problems of L2 processing (Faerch and
Kasper, 1984)
●
ways of filling vocabulary gaps in the first or second language (Poulisse, 1990)
Keywords
L2 learners are attempting to communicate through a language that is not their
own. L2 learning differs from L1 learning because mental and social development
go hand in hand with language development in the L1 child’s life. Hence, unlike
L1 children, L2 learners are always wanting to express things for which they do
not have the means in the second language; they know there are things they can-
not say, while L1 children do not. First we look at three different approaches to
communication strategies. The detailed lists of strategies used by these approaches
are summarized in Box 6.3 on page 112, which can be referred to during this 
section.
Communication strategies as social interaction
Elaine Tarone (1980) emphasizes social aspects of communication. Both partici-
pants in a conversation are trying to overcome their lack of shared meaning. She
sees three overall types of strategy: communication, production and learning, the
first of which we will consider here. When things go wrong, both participants try
to devise a communication strategy to get out of the difficulty.

---

One type of strategy is to paraphrase what you want to say. Typical strategies are:
●
Approximation. Someone who is groping for a word falls back on a strategy of
using a word that means approximately the same, say ‘animal’ for ‘horse’,
because the listener will be able to deduce what is intended from the context.
●
Word coinage. Another form of paraphrase is to make up a word to substitute for
the unknown word – ‘airball’ for ‘balloon’.
●
Circumlocution. L2 learners talk their way round the word – ‘when you make a
container’ for ‘pottery’.
All these strategies rely on the speaker trying to solve the difficulty through the
second language.
A second overall type of communication strategy is to fall back on the first lan-
guage, known as transfer. Examples are:
●
Translation from the L1. A German-speaking student says ‘Make the door shut’
rather than ‘Shut the door’.
●
Language switch. ‘That’s a nice tirtil’ (caterpillar). This is distinct from
codeswitching because the listener does not know the L1.
●
Appeal for assistance. ‘What is this?’
●
Mime what you need. My daughter succeeded in getting some candles in a shop
in France by singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in English and miming blowing out 
candles.
A third overall type of strategy is avoidance: do not talk about things you know
are difficult to express in the second language, whether whole topics or individual
words.
Ellen Bialystok (1990) compared the effectiveness of some of these strategies
and found that listeners understand word coinage more than approximation, cir-
cumlocution or language switch, though in terms of sheer frequency word
coinage was very rare, the commonest strategy being circumlocution.
These types of strategy are particularly important to the teacher who is aiming
to teach some form of social interaction to the students. If they are to succeed in
conversing with other people through the second language, they need to practise
the skill of conducting conversations in which they are not capable of saying
everything they want to. This contrasts with some older language teaching tech-
niques which tried to ensure that the students never found themselves doing
what they had not been taught. The ability to repair the conversation when things
go wrong is vital to using the second language. Maximally the suggestion would be
that the teacher specifically teaches the strategies rather than letting them emerge
out of the students’ own attempts. In this case there would be specific exercises on
approximation or word coinage, say, before the students had to put them together
in a real conversation.