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CHAPTER ONEINTRODUCTION

1.1 A Brief Description of the Study
The participants were two intact classes of 58 non-English majors in JingjiangIndependent College, Jiangsu University. One class was randomly designated as theexperimental group (EG), and the other as the control group (CG). The EG, whichconsisted of 29 participants, received explicit CS instruction, whereas the CG with thesame population as the EG followed the regular way of teaching with no explicit focuson communication strategies (CSs). The CS training lasted over a span of 16 weeks, 1hour a week. A brief introduction of CS training was made in the first week to makelearners in the EG have a global picture of it. The following 15 weeks concerning theexplicit teaching of five selected CSs were divided into two stages. The first stage took5 weeks, focusing on the theoretical instruction of the selected CSs and the remaining10 weeks went to the second stage in which five phases (review, practice, evaluation,extracurricular practice and feedback) were involved. The instruments adopted to elicitdata were questionnaires, oral tests and semi-structured interview. Both quantitativeand qualitative analyses were adopted to examine the effects of CS training. Thefindings yielded from the study are as follows:(1) The present situation of CS use among non-English majors in the independentcollege was far from satisfactory. They did not have a very clear idea of CSs and rarelyemployed them in the communication as well.(2) The CS training exerted positive effects on learners' oral performance andfrequency of CS use, which was embodied specifically in the following three aspects.First, learners in the EG scored much higher than those in the CG in the post oral testand their oral scores improved a lot more than did in the pre-oral test. Second, in thepost oral test, learners in the EG utilized significantly more CSs than those in the CGand compared with the pre-oral test, the EG increased their frequency of CS usesignificantly in the post oral test. Third, learners' oral performance positively correlatedto their CS use. The more CSs they utilized in the oral test, the higher scores they werelikely to gain.
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1.2 Background of the Study
The notion of CSs is first proposed by Selinker (1972), who assumes CSs are vitalin learning interlanguage. However, he does not provide a detailed description aboutthe nature of them in speech. In the same year, Savignon (1972) makes an initiativeattempt to train students coping strategies (the term she used for CSs) and points outtheir importance in communicative language teaching and testing in a research report.Since then, it has aroused researchers’ great interest in studying CSs. The firstempirical study of CSs is conducted by Tarone (1977). She tries to employ theterminological framework of CSs established by Tarone, Cohen and Dumas in 1976 toexamine CSs used in adult English learners' speech production. Additionally, she offersher definition and classification of CSs. These studies prepare the ground forsubsequent studies of CSs.The early 1980s witnesses a flourishing development of CSs. Canale and Swain(1980) and Canale (1983) put forward a model of communicative competence (CC) inwhich CSs are regarded as one of the components of CC and are compensatory inessence used only when other competences are not enough to cope with theencountered communicative problem. F?rch and Kasper (1983) publish a