A Study on the communication strategies used by field dependent and independent Turkish EFL learners to express lexical meaning

Ill ABSTRACT The fact that some learners are more successful at acquiring/ learning a second or foreign language than others has led to investigations of individual characteristics as predictors of successful L2 acquisition; thus, language learners have become the main interest of second/foreign language researchers. In this study, the effect of cognitive styles (field independence and field dependence) on the type and the number of the communication strategies Turkish EFL learners use was examined. The aim of this study was to reveal whether the cognitive styles of the learners affected the selection of communication strategies at lexical level in oral production. For this study, 40 (20FI-20FD) upper-intermediate Turkish EFL learners were selected as the subjects. They were engaged in three different type of tasks, namely picture description, re-telling a story and interview. Transcriptions of these tasks were analysed and categorised by two independent raters. The findings of the study suggested that learners' communication strategies do not vary in terms of total use. But when the types of strategies were considered, L2 based strategies were found to be used more often by both FI and FD groups. It was concluded that task types motivate learners to appeal to different communication strategies.