Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Conceptual archistrategy
This involved solving the problem by thinking of the meaning of the word and
attempting to convey it in another way:
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Analytic strategy. Here the learner tries to break up the meaning of the word into
parts, and then to convey the parts separately: so a student searching for the
word ‘parrot’ says ‘talk uh bird’, taking the two parts ‘bird that talks’.

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Holistic strategy. Here the learner thinks of the meaning of the word as a whole
and tries to use a word that is the closest approximation; for example, seeking
for the word ‘desk’, a student produces ‘table’, which captures all the salient
features of ‘desk’ apart from the fact that it is specifically for writing at.
Linguistic archistrategy
Here the students fall back on the language resources inside their head, such as:
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Morphological creativity. One possibility is to make up a word using proper end-
ings and hope that it works; for instance, trying to describe the act of ‘ironing’,
the student came up with the word ‘ironise’.
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L1 transfer. The students also have a first language on tap. It is possible for them
to transfer a word from the first to the second language, hoping that it is going
to exist in the new language. Thus a Dutch student trying to say ‘waist’ says
‘middle’ – the Dutch word is in fact ‘middel’.
This approach led to an interesting conclusion. The linguistic transfer strategy
requires knowledge of another language and hence is unique to L2 learning.
However, the conceptual strategies are the same as those used in native speech
when speakers cannot remember the word they want to use. Describing to a
mechanic which parts of my car needed repairing, I said, ‘There’s oil dripping
from that sort of junction in the pipe behind the engine’ – an analytic strategy.
This not only allowed me to communicate without knowing the correct words; it
also means I never need to learn them – I still do not know what this part of the
car is called and never will. Such strategies occur more frequently in the speech of
L2 learners only because they know fewer words than native speakers. The strate-
gies are used by native speakers in the same way as L2 learners when they too do
not know the words, as any conversation overheard in a shop selling do-it-your-
self tools will confirm. Kellerman and his colleagues believe that these compensa-
tory strategies are a part of the speaker’s communicative competence that can be
used in either language when needed, rather than something peculiar to L2 learn-
ing (Kellerman et al., 1990). Poulisse indeed showed that people had preferences
for the same type of strategy when they were faced with finding a word they did
not know in both the first and the second language; the only difference is that this
situation arises far more frequently in a second language!
So it is not clear that compensatory strategies need to be taught. L2 learners
resort to these strategies in the situation outside the classroom when they do not
know words. This does not mean that it may not be beneficial for students to have
their attention drawn to them so that they are reminded that these strategies can
indeed be used in a second language; Zoltan Dornyei (1995), however, has
demonstrated that Hungarian students who were taught communication strate-
gies improved in their ability to define words, compared to control groups. In a
sense, such strategies form part of the normal repertoire of the students’ commu-
nicative competence. In any teaching activity that encourages the learners to
speak outside their normal vocabulary range, they are bound to occur. An exercise
in Keep Talking (Klippel, 1984) suggests that the students describe their everyday
problems, such as losing their keys and not being able to remember names, and
other students suggest ways of solving them. If the students do not know the word
Strategies for communicating and learning
110

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for ‘key’, for example, they might ask the teacher (a cooperative strategy) or look
it up in a dictionary (a non-cooperative strategy), or they might attempt an analyt-
ical archistrategy: ‘the thing you open doors with’.
To give some idea of what students actually do, look at the transcript of a con-
versation in Box 6.2. Are the strategies we have described actually being used, and
how important are they to the students’ interaction?
Communication strategies 111