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Communication strategies in French as a foreign language

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Author

Summary, in English

This paper examines the role communication strategies play in the maintenance of communication in a classroom. The effect these strategies may have on the acquisition of a language is also discussed. There is often a lack of communication in a Swedish foreign language classroom which leads to the inability to communicate in a native-like way even after several years of learning the language. This lack of communication training is partly due to the great number of students that a teacher is responsible for. It is not an easy task for a teacher to allow twenty students to communicate freely in a situation which is strictly limited in time. Even a classroom can give opportunities for communication though. One method is to be discussed in this paper and involves students working in pairs. Porter 1986:202 mentions earlier research which shows that learners do not necessarily copy the errors that are made by their conversational partner. Exercises carried out by two learners therefore constitute a method to increase communication and is worth a closer examination. This paper will also deal with the proposition that different kinds of classroom exercises can give rise to variation in the practicing of a language. The pilot study that is the basis of this paper, was carried out in a Swedish classroom with learners of French as a foreign language. The subjects are in their fourth year of French studies and have no or little experience of French in ‘natural’ situations. The purpose of this study was to determine the role of communication strategies in communication between two learners in three different tasks. The tasks differed in that they involved varied degrees of control, i.e. the extent to which the subject was free to choose his own utterances. To create an authentic classroom setting, the tasks were designed in order to be able to be used as a means of communication training in a classroom.

Publishing year

1997

Language

English

Publication/Series

Working Papers, Lund University, Dept. of Linguistics

Volume

46

Document type

Working paper

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Status

Published