The Common European Framework in its political and educational context What is the Common European Framework?

4.4
Communicative language activities and strategies
To carry out communicative tasks, users have to engage in communicative language
activities and operate communication strategies.
Many communicative activities, such as conversation and correspondence, are interac-
tive, that is to say, the participants alternate as producers and receivers, often with several
turns.
In other cases, as when speech is recorded or broadcast or written texts are sent out or
published, producers are separated from receivers, whom they may not even know and
who are unable to respond. In these cases the communicative event can be regarded as
the speaking, writing, listening to or reading of a text. 
In most cases, the user as speaker or writer is producing his own text to express his
own meanings. In others, he/she is acting as a channel of communication (often, but not
necessarily, in different languages) between two or more persons who for one reason or
another cannot communicate directly. This process, mediation, may be interactive or not.
Many if not most situations involve a mixture of activity types. In a school language
class, for instance, a learner may be required to listen to a teacher’s exposition, to read a
textbook, silently or aloud, to interact with fellow pupils in group or project work, to
write exercises or an essay, and even to mediate, whether as an educational activity or in
order to assist another pupil.
Strategies are a means the language user exploits to mobilise and balance his or her
resources, to activate skills and procedures, in order to fulfil the demands of communi-
cation in context and successfully complete the task in question in the most comprehen-
sive or most economical way feasible depending on his or her precise purpose.
Communication strategies should therefore not be viewed simply with a disability model
– as a way of making up for a language deficit or a miscommunication. Native speakers
regularly employ communication strategies of all kinds (which will be discussed below)
when the strategy is appropriate to the communicative demands placed upon them.
The use of communication strategies can be seen as the application of the metacogni-
tive principles: Pre-planning, Execution, Monitoring, and Repair Action to the different kinds
of communicative activity: Reception, Interaction, Production and Mediation. The word
‘strategies’ has been used in different ways. Here what is meant is the adoption of a par-
ticular line of action in order to maximise effectiveness. Skills that are an inevitable part
of the process of understanding or articulating the spoken and written word (e.g. chunk-
ing a stream of sound in order to decode it into a string of words carrying propositional
meaning) are treated as lower-level skills, in relation to the appropriate communicative
process (see section 4.5).
Progress in language learning is most clearly evidenced in the learner’s ability to
engage in observable language activities and to operate communication strategies. They
are therefore a convenient basis for the scaling of language ability. A suggested scaling
is given in this chapter for various aspects of the activities and strategies discussed.
4.4.1
Productive activities and strategies
Productive activities and strategies include both speaking and writing activities.
Language use and the language user/learner 
57

---

4.4.1.1
In