Communication strategies used by Norwegian students of English

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of communication strategies by Norwegian learners of English, based on transcribed interviews recorded as part of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin et al. 2010). The data consists of 380 instances of communication strategies which have been categorized according to a taxonomy compiled from various pre-existing taxonomies of such strategies. The study reveals that the learners resort to achievement strategies in 96% of the cases. Among the achievement strategies, L2-based strategies are the most common, which makes sense considering the learners’ fairly high competence level in English. A substantial number of instances of L1-based strategies, such as code switching, can be attributed to the fact that the interviewers understand Norwegian perfectly despite being native speakers of English. This strategy type thus contributes positively to fluency, rather than disrupts communication. Other aspects that are analyzed include the tendency for different strategy types to occur in clusters, and the success of different types of cooperation strategies, where the learner implicitly or explicitly appeals to the interviewer for assistance.