5. Discussion and Conclusion
With respect to the first research question, findings of the present study revealed that all
communication strategies in the integrated framework were employed by the students.
Moreover, the present study indicates that the students tended to rely on compensatory
strategies (94.85%) more frequently than avoidance strategies (5.30%), indicating that the
students attempted to keep the conversation flowing and maintain their interaction with the
interlocutor. This could be explained that participants were familiar with the English language
as they studied in the English program. Put simply, the familiarity of L2 could determine the
frequency of CS use. Therefore, they had an awareness of using the target language in the
required communication situations.
It is also worth pointing out that among twenty-two communication strategies,
fillers/hesitation devices appeared to be the most-frequently used strategies (43.33%) as they
tended to be overused when the students performed their task. This is because the use of this
strategy allowed the students to process their cognitive demands required from the task as
well as did help the speech to flow naturally. Generally speaking, the students “slipped” fillers
in their actual speech rather than “used” them. In contrast, the least frequently - used
communication strategy appeared to be “foreignizing” (0.05%) as it was unusual to adjust L1
both morphologically and phonically to L2 because L2 (English) has different characteristics
from L1 (Thai).
To answer research question 2, the findings indicated that English-speaking proficiency did
not have the impact on the choices of communication strategies. This result could be
explained that no matter how L2-proficient they are, Thai EFL learners seemed to have the
target language problems, thus leading them to use communication strategies as the tool to
overcome communication difficulties . In other words, each student had an ability to tackle
with individually communicative problems by employing communication strategies. This
provided support for Willems (1987), who maintains the ability to speak is not the same as the
ability to employ communication strategies. Nevertheless, it was observed that high and
middle-English speaking proficiency students tended to be enthusiastic in performing both
tasks than low English-speaking proficiency students.
The findings seemed to provide support to the explanation of Long (1990) regarding the
effects of task types on the use of communication strategies that the oral interview, as an open
task, promoted negotiation that involved talking about various topics which required the
students to share their own information and resorted to interactional strategies which required
them to use available resources in their linguistic repertoire to help them solve their
difficulties. In contrast, picture story narrative task is considered as close task in natural which
required the students to reach single, correct answer or one of the small finite set of solutions.
Therefore, they were likely to give up when faced with language difficulties. Regarding
interactional strategies, it was found that oral interview task allowed the students to resort