Oral Communication Strategies Used by Turkish Students Learning English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The study aims to identify the oral communication strategies used by the students learning English as a foreign language in Turkey, using a reliable and valid measurement tool. Thus, the Strategy Inventory of Oral Communication (SIOC), developed by the present authors specifically for the Turkish culture, was used. The Cronbach alpha coefficient for the whole inventory, including five factors: negotiation for meaning strategies, message abandonment strategies, organizing/planning strategies, affective strategies, and compensatory strategies, amounted to 0.79. The inventory was administered to 294 EFL students at the English Language Teaching Department of Mersin University. The study aimed to investigate the differences in the use of oral communication strategies in terms of language proficiency level and gender. It was found that negotiation for meaning and compensatory strategies are the most frequently used, with no statistically significant differences in terms language proficiency. Message abandonment and planning strategies, on the other hand, were the least frequently used strategies, favored mostly by intermediate level students. Moreover, there were significant differences in the use of oral communication strategies in terms of gender. While female students used message abandonment strategies more frequently than males, males used affective strategies more frequently than females.