Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Communication strategies as psychological problem solving
The approach of Faerch and Kasper (1984) concentrates on the psychological
dimension of what is going on in the L2 speaker’s mind. L2 learners want to express
Communication strategies 107

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something through the second language; they make a plan for how to do it, but
they encounter a hitch. To get round this psychological difficulty, they resort to
communication strategies. Faerch and Kasper divide these into two main groups:
achievement (trying to solve the problem) and avoidance (trying to avoid it).
Achievement strategies
These subdivide into cooperative strategies, such as appealing to the other person
for help, which are mostly similar to Tarone’s list, and non-cooperative strategies,
where the learner tries to solve the problems without recourse to others. One form
of non-cooperation is to fall back on the first language when in trouble by:
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Codeswitching. The speaker skips language – ‘Do you want to have some ah
Zinsen?’ (the German word for ‘interest’).
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Foreignerization. A Dane literally translating the Danish word for vegetables into
English as ‘green things’.
These strategies seem likely to occur when the listener knows both languages, as
in many situations where codeswitching takes place.
Another overall grouping is interlanguage strategies, based on the learner’s
evolving L2 system rather than on the L1. Among these, Faerch and Kasper
include:
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Substitution. Speakers substitute one word for another, say ‘if’ for ‘whether’ if
they cannot remember whether ‘whether’ has an ‘h’.
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Generalization. L2 speakers use a more general word rather than a more partic-
ular one, such as ‘animal’ for ‘rabbit’, that is, shifting up from the basic level of
vocabulary described in Chapter 3 to the superordinate.
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Description. Speakers cannot remember the word for ‘kettle’ and so describe it as
‘the thing to cook water in’.
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Exemplification. Speakers give an example rather than the general term, such as
‘cars’ for ‘transport’, that is, shift down a level.
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Word coining. That is, making up a word when a speaker does not know it, such
as inventing an imaginary French word ‘heurot’ for ‘watch’.
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Restructuring. The speaker has another attempt at the same sentence, as in a
learner struggling to find the rare English word ‘sibling’: ‘I have two – er – one
sister and one brother’.