A Diagnosis Of Chinese EFL Learners' Use Of Communication Strategies

With the emphasis of second language acquisition shifting from learning products to learning process,diagnostic language testing is gaining increasing attention in foreign language teaching and testing.Besides,communication strategy,an essential part of second language communicative competence,has received growing attention thanks to the shift of focus from linguistic competence to communicative competence.To help second language learners to improve communicative competence,it's necessary to help them diagnose and solve the problems they may have in the use of communicative strategies.Applying diagnostic assessment approach to Chinese EFL learners' use of communication strategy,the current study aims to answer the following questions1.What are the results of Chinese EFL learners' self-assessment of their communication strategy use? Do language proficiency and gender affect their self-assessment of communication strategy use?2.What problems do Chinese EFL learners have in communication strategy use? Do task type,language proficiency,and gender affect their problems in communication strategy use?3.Are there any mismatches between learners' self-assessment and their actual communication strategy use?4.What are the causes for EFL learners' problems with communication strategies use?The present study adopted a mixed design of quantitative and qualitative research.102 freshmen and juniors from a leading university in China took part in the research.Among the participants,there were 56 freshmen,46 juniors and 24 males,78 females.A self-reported questionnaire,two speaking tasks and retrospective verbal protocol were used to collect data.SPSS 23.0 was employed to analyze the collected data.All the 102 participants took the self-reported communication strategy questionnaires.Due to the restriction of equipment,60 Chinese EFL students took part in the speaking tasks and retrospective verbal protocols,with 30 of them being freshmen,30 being juniors,18 being males and 42 being females.The present research generated the following findings.1)Generally speaking,Chinese EFL students employed significantly more acquisitionfacilitating communication strategies in their self-assessment.Language proficiency and gender did not affect their choices of communication strategies according to the self-assessment.2)Generally speaking,Chinese EFL students resorted to significantly more acquisitionfacilitating communication strategies in speaking tasks.Two-way tasks generated significantly more use of acquisition-facilitating and non-acquisitions-facilitating communication strategies.Lower-proficiency EFL learners employed significantly more non-acquisition-facilitating communication strategies while higher-proficiency students utilized significantly more acquisition-facilitating communication strategies.Male EFL students utilized significantly less acquisition-facilitating communication strategies.3)No mismatches were found between EFL learners' self-assessed and actual use of communication strategies.4)Causes for the Chinese EFL learners' problems with CS use(use of non-facilitative CSs)include not knowing how to express the intended meaning,lack of L2 vocabulary and belief that the Chinese peer interlocutors could understand them.The results of the study suggest that male and low proficiency Chinese EFL learners need more training of communication strategies and two-way tasks are helpful for improving EFL learners' use of communication strategies.Moreover,to solve Chinese EFL learners' problems with communication strategies use,their second language vocabulary and other second language resources need to be improved.The current study also provides evidence that diagnostic assessment plays an important role in helping teachers and learners find problems with learners' communication strategy use.