Repetitions as communication strategies used by Turkish adult EFL learners: A cross-sectional study

Communication strategies (CSs) are coping strategies that second language learners resort to when they face a problem during their speech in their Interlanguage (IL) system. IL includes the fossilization of first language (L1) and second language (L2) rules. As a result of this fossilization, language learners develop a different system with its own structures and rules apart from their native (NL) and the target languages (TL). Since the utterances produced by second language learners have the potential to be erroneous, these learners make use of CSs to compensate for their mistakes. This notion has attracted many researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) research for the past four decades. This study was designed as a descriptive study aiming to investigate the effects of the duration of exposure to TL on the usage of repetitions as CSs in the oral narratives of 48 Turkish learners of English in the English Language Teaching (ELT) Department of Çukurova University. Twelve students from each first, second, third and fourth year were randomly selected to investigate whether their usage of repetitions as CSs got affected by their amount of exposure to TL during their university education. Making use of cross-sectional analysis, this study revealed gradual differences among types and forms of repetitions across these groups. The findings of this study show that participants resort to repetitions as CSs during communication breakdowns in their oral narratives. Regardless of the year, all the participants used vocalized fillers to gain time and self-repairs to attempt to correct their previous erroneous utterance and pronunciation, to make an explanation and to emphasize a part of speech. These results are also supported by the pilot study which was conducted for this study. The study reveals that there is no systematic effect of sole exposure on the usage of repetitions either as vocalized fillers or self-repairs across groups even though some parts of the results seem to be significant. In addition, exposure by itself has no effect on the repetitions' word classes or types as word-level, grouplevel or sentence-level. The findings of this study have important implications for teaching English as a foreign language in schools or at university level making a reference to the effects of exposure on the usage of repetitions as communication strategies. Key Words: Interlanguge; Communication Strategies; Repetitions; Exposure.