A Study Of English Native Speakers’ Chinese Oral Communication Strategies Using The MicroGenetic Method

The communication strategy is a compensation measures to make up the lack of language knowledge and to solve the communication problems.In 1972,the concept of "communicative strategies" was put forward and some related research began.The research that Chinese is the second language communication strategy(hereinafter referred to as Chinese communication strategy)started quite late,dating from the 1990 s.And then the study of Chinese communication strategy developed slowly.The reason is that there is still no conclusion about the "communication strategy" theory,and the empirical research of "communicative strategy" and the collection of corpus take a lot of time and efforts,and the research conditions are limited.This article uses the microgenetic method to conduct eight interactive oral conversations in the way of open-end interview with six native English-speaking Chinese learners at weekly or daily intervals.A total of 310,000 words of interactive oral corpus were collected.According to the corpus of this study,in the ways of Tarone(1981)’s communication strategy classification framework,we records from learners’ use of communication strategies in conversations for the following aspects,including"first attempt to use communication strategy","listener response","second compensatory use of communication strategy","result of solving communicative difficulty",“number of turn-taking".And 1414 cases of communication strategies are collected from the corpus.The microgenetic method can be used in recording and observing the change of details that occurs before the communication strategy or after the communication strategy,so as to qualitatively analyse the use of communication strategies and their influencing factors;at the same time,quantitative analysis of recorded data can summarize and predict the influencing factors of the use of communication strategies.We conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the collected corpus and data of communication strategy cases,and obtain the following research results:1.Taking Tarone(1981)communication strategy classification as the framework,and exemplifying and supplementing the framework by adding the Chinese corpus collected in this study.2.The relationship,influences and performance between communication strategies and conversation repair mechanism.3.Through quantitative analysis,we observe the six subjects from such aspects,including the number and preference of communication strategies,the track of changes in the number of communication strategies used during the interview cycle,the factors influencing the listener response in the communication strategy,and the relationship between listener response and the number of turn-taking in the case of communication strategy.Based on the phenomena observed in this study,we recommend using schema theory to train students on the use of "approximation" strategies;design communicative tasks such as "pictures describing" and "explanations of noun",train students on the use of "circumlocution" strategies and encourage students to use The language description expresses more information.At the same time,we believe that all communication strategies,regardless of good or bad,need to be used flexibly according to the specific situation,in order to achieve the most convenient and efficient use.