Second lenguage writing: comunication strategies in narrative and descriptive texts

Abstract

The primary data in the field of second language acquisition is learner language,which has been investigated from different perspectives. An important area of researchhas described and explained what happens when L2 learners attempt to conveymeanings in the foreign language being learnt. The concept "communication strategy"was introduced in the research literature in order to explain the difficulties experiencedby L2 learners due to a limited command of the target language. Different taxonomiesof communication strategies have been developed by researchers to account for thoseproblems This cross-sectional, descriptive study investigates a) the relation between thetype of communication strategy and the genre attempted in writing, and b) the relationbetween the students` perceptions of the difficulties experienced whíle composing andthe identified communication strategies in their written texts The corpus consisted of ten descriptive and ten narrative written texts, collectedfrom ten EFL learners attending their first year at the English Training College atUniversidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, and ten questionnaires on the learners` perceptionsof the difficulties experienced while writing the two genres. Ah l these data wereanalysed qualitative and quantitatively The findings showed that L I- and L2-based lexical communication strategieswere employed in both genres, with a higher frequency of L2-based ones. It was alsofound that the students` responses to the questionnaires were highly consistent with thewritten texts in relation to the problems they experienced, namely, lexical, as shown bytheir recourse to lexical communication strategies, and also to the difficultiesdetermined by the genre attempted Limitations of this study are discussed, pedagogical implications are suggested,and directions for further research are given, particularly as regards the development oflearners` strategic competence to overcome linguistic difficulties.