Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

21
105
Communicating Strategically in Spanish as L2
Maritza Rosas Maldonado
Communicating Strategically in Spanish
as L2
Maritza Rosas Maldonado
University of Liverpool
maritza.rosas@liv.ac.uk
One area of language learning in which Applied Linguistics has made an
important contribution is in extending our understanding of the important
role of Communication Strategies (CSs). This term refers to the different
mechanisms L2 learners apply to overcome difficulties encountered in
communicating. However, research has not thoroughly examined CSs in
interactional contexts and has focused mainly on lexical problems and
English as L2. This paper, which presents work in progress, examines the
way in which English L2 learners of Spanish use CSs in communicating
face-to-face with other learners (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs) of
Spanish. The final aim is to investigate CSs and their possible contribution
to learners’ successful communication.
Learners with two different proficiency levels interacted face-to-face in
dyads of NNS-NNS and NNS-NS performing two types of tasks: a closed
task (a jigsaw activity) and an open task (a free-conversation activity). Both
tasks were selected from a pilot study previously conducted and which
aimed at finding the best methodology for the collection of data for this
larger research. A total of 36 interactions with different combinations of
dyad and task were elicited by means of video and audio recording,
observation of participants’ interactions and stimulated recall methodology.
For the subsequent analysis, the tasks performed by the participants and
their retrospective comments were transcribed using the software Transana
(Woods & Fassnacht, 2005). This data was then examined using the
theoretical framework proposed by Dӧrnyei & Kӧrmos (1998), and the
interactional and paralinguistic CSs presented in a previous review on these
strategies by Dӧrnyei & Scott (1995). In order to carry out this analysis and
be able to identify the greatest number of mechanisms possible, a
categorisation of the different ways of identifying the CSs was devised.
This classification constituted the coding scheme that was set up with the
software used for the analysis, the UAM corpus tool (O’Donnell, 2007). As
a final procedure a one-to-one inter-rater reliability test was carried out to
assess and validate results and reduce the researcher’s bias.