Strategic competence of Turkish as a foreign language learners

Strategic competence is the knowledge of the speaker's strategies to cope with the difficulties during communication and make the communication more effective. During an interaction, participants apply linguistic devices known as communication strategies to prevent communication breakdowns caused by issues such as not recalling a structure or vocabulary or not knowing if something is acceptable for a given context in a target language, as well as to maintain communication, and enhance the effectiveness of communication. This study aims to identify the communication strategies adopted by the Turkish as a foreign language learners and the impact of factors including gender, educational background, and the number of the languages spoken other than Turkish in the distribution of those strategies. Afterwards this distribution is compared to the communication strategies used by native speakers. This study is based on a qualitative research method and a descriptive survey modal is used. It is held with 11 participants, 7 of whom are learners at B1 level and 4 native Turkish speakers. The study's database is created with the transcription of videos taken based on an unstructured interview technique. This data is analyzed with a conversation analysis method based on the taxonomy of Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei and Thurell (1995), Dörnyei and Scott (1997). Following this taxonomy, communication strategies are classified into five main types as avoidance and reduction, achievement and compensatory, stalling and time-gaining, self-monitoring, and interactional strategies. Strategies under each strategy type are analyzed individually. The study's findings show that stalling and time-gaining is the most commonly used strategy type and use of fillers, which comes under this strategy type, is the most common strategy employed by the Turkish as a foreign language learners. In the analysis of this data according to the participants' demographics, it is found that the male participants employ communication strategies more than females do. It is found that as the education level increases, the usage of communication strategies increases correspondingly; on the other hand, as the number of languages spoken increases, the usage of communication strategies decreases. When the Turkish as a foreign language learners' usage of communication strategies compared to that of native Turkish speakers, it is found that the learners use more communication strategies than the native speakers do. Keywords: Teaching Turkish as a foreign language, strategic competence, communication strategies