COMMUNICATION STRATEGY (CS)
A linguistic or paralinguistic technique used for overcoming obstacles to communication. Communication strategies are often compensatory, with a language user making adjustments in response to a gap in linguistic knowledge. A useful distinction can be made between the productive CSs used when expressing oneself in speech or writing and the receptive ones used to counter problems of understanding. The extent to which both types of CS are used may reflect the personality of the language user. There is likely to be much greater use by risk takers with a strong impulse to communicate than by risk-avoiders who feel constrained by the need to achieve accuracy.
Productive CSs have particularly been studied in relation to second language acquisition, where strategic competence (the ability to express oneself despite limited linguistic means) is seen as an important factor in the ability to communicate. Second language users, wishing to express a concept for which they do not have adequate language, make a choice between two courses of action:
avoidance behaviour aimed at circumventing a topic, grammatical structure or lexical item;
achievement behaviour where a linguistic goal is maintained, but achieved by a less direct route than a native speaker might employ.
Possible types of strategy include: switching into the first language, using a more general or approximate term, paraphrasing, inventing a possible word by analogy with a word in L1 or L2 and adopting a simpler syntactic structure. Also available are paralinguistic techniques such as pointing or miming.
Research into receptive strategies has mainly been restricted to a first language context, with studies of how less-skilled young readers compensate for an incomplete understanding of a text. A central issue has been the extent to which weak decoding skills lead the reader to rely upon top-down information. Stanovich’s interactive compensatory theory provides one possible model of strategy use which can be applied to both written and spoken modalities.
See also: Interactive compensatory hypothesis, Strategy
Further reading: Cohen (1998); Faerch and Kasper (1983); Kasper and Kellerman (1997)
