A Study Of Bilingual Teachers’ Use Of Communication Strategies In Class

With the economic development and globalization of education in the 21 th century, the international exchange and cooperation between countries are becoming more and more frequent. The demand for versatile talents equipped with both English proficiency and technological knowledge is increasing. However, such talents are in extremely scarcity under the traditional teaching mode. Thus, in 2001, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China issued a document titled Opinions on Strengthening Undergraduate Teaching and Improving Teaching Quality in Higher Learning Institutions. It demanded that active measures be taken to use foreign languages such as English to teach both general and specialized courses in undergraduate education. Thereafter, bilingual teaching, the mode in which subjects are taught in foreign language, has been widely adopted in more and more Chinese colleges and universities. However, high level bilingual courses are not easy to be carried out. Except for the reasonable curriculum design and suitable teaching material, successful bilingual teaching calls for both teachers’ and students’ high foreign language proficiency. When evaluating foreign language proficiency, it is well-known that communicative competence plays a decisive role.According to the widely accepted theory devised by Canale and Swain(1980), communicative competence consists of three parts: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence. Among them, strategic competence which means the ability to use communication strategies is quite crucial yet easily ignored. Review of literature demonstrates that bilingual teaching both at home and abroad mainly focuses on the bilingual teaching mode, faculty, teaching material and evaluation system, only very limited studies are concerned with analyzing class discourse to reveal teachers’ use of communication strategies. But research on classroom communication strategies used by bilingual teachers is scant.Thus, this study aims to investigate teachers’ use of communication strategies and both teachers’ and students’ perceptions. The research questions are formulated as follows:a. What communication strategies do teachers employ in their bilingual class?b. What are the bilingual teachers’ and students’ perceptions on the use ofcommunication strategies?In order to answer the research questions, the author randomly selected English for Traffic and Transportation, English for Architectural Environment and Equipment Engineering, and English for Plant Protection, the three bilingual courses from the 28 courses offered by Shandong Agricultural University in the second semester in 2014-2015 academic year. In the whole semester, the author has recorded every class after securing three target bilingual teachers’ permission. Then based on the transcript of the videos, the author analyzed teachers’ use of communication strategies. Furthermore, after each class, stimulated recalls were given to the target teacher to investigate his perception on communication strategies. Besides, GPA was employed to divide students into different stratifications. Then the author adopted random stratified sampling to choose students from three classes for group interview.The results of the study indicated that there are all together 12 categories and 28 subcategories of communication strategies used by three target bilingual teachers. In addition, target teachers have employed more discourse enhancement strategies than those of discourse repair. Finally, there is a high level of congruence between teachers’ and students’ perceptions on communication strategies, and part of communication strategies have negative influence on students’ attention in the class.According to the research results, implications are given as follows. First, bilingual teachers training should not only lay emphasis on the theoretical level, but also on the development of teachers’ communicational competence and oral expression. Second, bilingual teachers should do more oral exercises to increase the internalized communication strategies. Finally, more positive influencing communication strategies should be employed by teachers and the negative ones should be avoided.