RELATIONSHIP OF TARGET LANGUAGE COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES TO COMPREHENSIBILITY OF ORAL NARRATIONS

Abstract

The students' oral narrations on 3 picture stories were tape-recorded. Background questionnaires were administered to the students, and the comprehensibility of the English oral narrations were evaluated by 16 selected judges. Analysis of the data revealed that a) the students widely employed communication strategies in their oral narrations; b) the mean comprehensibility level of the students' narrations was below average; c) there was a significant relationship between the extent of use of communication strategies and oral language proficiency, as well as the use of communication strategies and message comprehensibility; and d) among the personal variables, the type of school, pronunciation, age, years in school, nervousness and sex were found to be significant predictors of the students' comprehensibility level. On the other hand, among the types of communication strategies, topic avoidance, simplification-reduction, circumlocution, modeling, code-switching, message abandonment, approximation and word coinage were found to be significant predictors of the students' comprehensibility level.