An analysis of communication strategies employed by Turkish-speakers of English

Mostly used when students confront with misunderstanding or some difficulty in carrying over their message to their interlocutors, Communication Strategies (CSs) are used by speakers to compensate for language problems. Communication Strategies (CSs) are used by speakers to compensate for language problems. The study of communication strategies has been the focus of a number of applied linguists whose main concern is the analysis of second-language use. Based on regularities in the behavior of interlanguage users, different definitions and different taxonomies of CSs were offered by these linguists. Some researchers claimed that research on CSs should be embedded in a general framework of referential (signified in a specified context) communication. From this perspective, participants were assigned referential communication tasks in this study. CSs, employed in the oral discourse, have been studied among speakers of various languages, such as Swedish, English, Arabic, Japanese, and French by using various data collection tools. However, this issue was not studied in Turkish speaker?s discourse by means of qualitative analysis. Therefore, this study aims to determine the communication strategies employed by Turkish speakers of English. With this aim in mind, 23 freshman students at Cukurova University ELT Department were assigned referential communication tasks in their speaking classes. The findings of the study indicate that two types of strategies emerged in the discussion of the participants: L1-based (language switch and literal translation), and L2-based (repetition, avoidance, paraphrase, ask for help, and mime strategies). Among these strategies, frequency of repetition strategy in Turkish speakers of English is considerably higher than other strategies. Mostly, filler type repetitions and quite frequent self-repairs were observed in the language production of all participants. Although most repetitions functioned as fillers in this study, their self-repair function, though small, cannot not be ignored since detecting one?s own mistakes is accepted to be a clear indicator of certain level of language proficiency. Key Words: communication strategy, oral discourse, speaking, interlanguage, Turkish speaker