College and University Educators Conversation Strategies: Do students use them? more

Sun, Jul 10, 10:35-11:00 Asia/Tokyo

Communicative language teaching is aimed at improving the learner’s communicative competence. According to the theory presented by Canale and Swain (1980), strategic competence is an important component of communicative competence, and it’s believed that communication strategies play an important role in the development of strategic competence, and therefore the development of a learner’s overall communicative competence. Despite its established importance in theory, this skill was lacking as a component in our first-year English Communication (EC) curriculum at Sojo University. Strategies for English conversation were thus introduced as part of our curriculum. As students move through the course, they build towards speaking assessments where their ability to participate in a conversation with their peers is evaluated. Conversation strategies are taught as part of the course in order to facilitate students’ success in these assessments. This exploratory study was conducted for the purpose of gathering general data about students’ knowledge of communicative competence, opinion of strategic competence, and perceptions of the specific strategies learned in their course. To better understand which strategies would be the most helpful to our students and how learning these strategies impacted their performance in the speaking assessments are what will be discussed in this presentation.