Communication Strategies

This book examines the topic of communication strategies, the ways in which people seek to express themselves or understand what someone else is saying or writing. Typically, the term has referred to the strategies that non-native speakers use to address the linguistic and pragmatic problems encountered in interactions with native and non-native speakers of the language in question.
Studies adopting a psycholinguistic perspective are well represented and updated in this volume. Other chapters re-examine communication strategies from a sociolinguistic perspective, exploring the strategies non-native speakers and their conversational partners use to create shared meanings in ongoing discourse. These studies reveal how communication strategies can serve to construct participants' identities and social relationships.
Finally, the book incorporates a number of chapters which cover strategy-like behaviour in other related areas, such as language pathology, child bilingualism, normal native adult interaction, and mother tongue education. These studies add fresh dimensions to the study of communication strategies, showing how the concept can usefully be extended beyond the realm of second language acquisition and use, and pointing out the commonalities in many domains of language behaviour.

Gabriele Kasper is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Hawai'i and has published extensively in the field of pragmatics and language research. Eric Kellerman is a Reader in the Departments of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Nijmegen. He has published in Second Language Research, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and Language Learning, and is Editor of 'The Clarion', the magazine of the European Second Language Association (EUROSLA).

Introduction: Approaches to communication strategies Gabriele Kasper and Eric Kellerman I Psycholinguistic perspectives 1. Investigating communication strategies in L2 reference: Pros and cons George Yule and Elaine Tarone 2. On psychological plausibility in the study of communication strategies Eric Kellerman and Ellen Bialystok 3. Compensatory strategies and the principles of clarity and economy Nanda Poulisse 4. Preference and order in first and second language referential communication George Russell 5. Strategies in verbal productions of brain-damaged individuals Brigitte Stemmer and Yves Joanette II Expanding the scope 6. Developing the ability to evaluate verbal information: The relevance of referential communication research Peter Lloyd 7. Can one be more than two? Mono- and bilinguals' production of German and Spanish object descriptions in a referential communication task Werner Deutsch, Nanci Bruhn, Gowert Masche and Heiki Behrens 8. 'Y ... no puodo decir mas nada': Distanced communication skills of Puerto Rican children Ana Maria Rodino and Catherine Snow 9. The lexical generation gap: A connectionist account of circumlocution in Chinese as a Second Language Patricia A. Duff 10. An introspective analysis of listener inferencing on a second language listening task Steven Ross 11. Studying language use as collaboration Deanne Wilkes-Gibbs III Sociolinguistic perspectives 12. A sociolinguistic perspective on L2 communication strategies Ben Rampton 13. Communication strategies in an interactional context: The mutual achievement of comprehension Jessica Williams, Rebecca Inscoe, and Thomas Tasker 14. Communication strategies at work Johannes Wagner and Alan Firth 15. Beyond reference Gabriele Kasper Bibliography Subject Index Name Index