91 / 2021-06-26 13:57:40

Communication Strategies in the Chinese EFL Primary School Classroom

communication strategies,EFL;,Primary school classroom,NS,NNSs

This study was designed to examine the communication strategies (CSs) used by non-native speaker learners (NNSs) and the native speaker teacher (NS) in the foreign language classroom in China. The total number of NNS subjects was 200, consisting of 108 girl pupils and 92 boy pupils, who were from 4 different Grade 4 classes in a primary school in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. The NS teacher in this study was a 31-year-old young man, coming from the USA. The author video-recorded the NS-NNS interaction activities and the total length of the four video-recordings amounts to 160 minutes (40 minutes per lesson). After analyzing the transcribed text, it was found that in order to make themselves understood, the NS prefers foreigner talk, discourse management and body language while NNS learners tend to use avoidance, code-switching, and literal translation as their CSs. Analysis showed that adoption of CSs was the result of a lack of lexical competence on the part of NNS learners. CSs provided opportunities to keep the flow of conversation going and thus increased learners’ exposure to input and produced pushed output. Therefore, using CSs either consciously or unconsciously in primary English classroom is considered an indispensable means of assisting L2 acquisition.