Learner variations in communication strategies : a study of Japanese, Chinese and American paraphrasing techniques in English and their application to task-based grammar instruction

摘要

This study investigated how speakers with different L1 backgrounds (Japanese, Chinese and English) would cope with the situation where they had a lexical difficulty in oral English discourse. A total of fifteen subjects participated inte study, consisting of a taped interview. They were asked to pretend to be tourists who did not recall the word for u27aquariumu27 while the interviewer assumed to be a police officer. Each interviewee had to manage to have the toe officer understand the destination by utilizing such communication strategies (CSs) as "paraphrasing," or "word coinage" in order to express the meaning of u27aquarium.u27 These conversations were all transcribed to see national variations as well as personal varieties with comparisons made between individual subjects in terms of word chice, length of speech, frequency of particular interjections or phrases, and clarity of speech. In this paper, the author proposes the application of the results to task-based grammar instruction in ESL/EFL classrooms.