An Investigation into Teaching Communiction Strategies to Japanese High School Students
202M047 A. I.
This thesis investigated whether Japanese high school students who were explicitly taught specific types of communication strategies (circumlocution, approximation, appeal for help, and fillers) would improve their strategic competence in spoken English. For this purpose, I conducted an 8-week study in two 1st-year "Oral Communication I" classes at my high school. The investigation involved an experiment group with explicit strategy instruction and a control group without it. The experiment group watched a video and had discussions about how to use the communication strategies and how effective they were, and afterwards engaged in various information-gap activities, whereas the control group only engaged in information-gap activities as the experiment group. In order to gain empirical data, I used a written proficiency test to select five students as subjects from each group and investigated the quantitative and the qualitative use of the communication strategies by both groups and the speech rate of both groups. The subjects in both groups were given a spoken test before and after the strategy instruction. In the tests, the subjects had two tasks: to describe two concrete objects, and to talk with a native speaker of English for three minutes. In addition, the experiment group completed a 7-scale questionnaire on the usefulness of the communication strategies. In order to analyze the data statistically, paired t-tests and Pearson correlation coefficients were adopted.
The results showed that there was no statistical difference in the strategy use between the experiment and the control groups and that the strategy training given to the experiment group did not directly influence their speech rate. The attitudes of the experiment group towards the usefulness of the communication strategies were moderately favourable. The results did not fully support any of the hypotheses, but further research will be necessary before reaching any conclusions. It would be necessary to improve the research method for future research: to increase the length of the instruction period and the number of the subjects, and to improve the strategy instruction and the tasks of the pre- and the post-tests.