Strategic Competence by Zoltán Dörnyei and Sarah Thurrell
Strategic Competence by Zoltán Dörnyei and Sarah Thurrell
Strategic Competence by Zoltán Dörnyei and Sarah Thurrell
Int roduc t ion The communicative approach to language teaching has been welcomed
and adopted in many parts of the world. However, as Nunan (1987: 137)
has pointed out, ‘While a great deal has been written on the theory and
practice of communicative language teaching, there have been compara-
tively few studies of actual communicative language practices’. He has
argued that the language classroom should be made more ‘communi-
cative’, and has called for research on how to foster communicative lan-
guage use.
As one response to Nunan’s comments, this article is intended to draw
attention to a crucial, and yet rather neglected, aspect of communicative
language skills strategic competence, which concerns the ability to express
oneself in the face of difficulties or limited language knowledge. The lack
of fluency or conversational skills that students often complain about is,
to a considerable extent, due to the underdevelopment of strategic com-
petence. Therefore, we believe that it is important to include strategy
training in a communicative syllabus. The paper is divided into two parts:
First, we provide an overview of what strategic competence involves.
Then we present a series of teaching tasks which we have successfully
used to facilitate the development of this competence in our students.
To remain in the conversation and to gain time to think, learners may also
18 Zoltán Dörnyei and Sarah Thurrell
use certain conversational formulae or ‘prefabricated conversational pat-
terns’ (Rubin, 1987), such as fillers or hesitation devices (e.g. I see; Well,
as a matter of fact). In written communication, a very common resource
expansion strategy is using a dictionary.
In an attempt to fill the gap, the following practical ideas for strategy
training are all aimed at enhancing some aspects of message adjustment
and resource expansion skills. They have all worked with our learners.
We hope that they will inspire teachers to include strategy training in their
lessons, as well as to design further techniques along these lines.
Fillers The knowledge and confident use of fillers are a crucial part of learners’
strategic competence, since these invaluable delaying or hesitation
devices can be used to carry on the conversation at times of difficulty,
when language learners would otherwise end up feeling more and more
desperate and would typically grind to a halt. Examples of fillers range
from very short structures (well; I mean; actually; you know), to what are
almost phrases (as a matter of fact; to be quite honest; now let me think;
I’ll tell you what; I see what you mean; etc.).
Going off the point Another important part of strategic competence is the ability to ‘go off
the point’ smoothly when you don’t want to, or simply cannot, answer a
question. If students learn how to evade the answer, or to slant the con-
versation in a desired direction, that will give them a lot of confidence,
because they will then know that they can remain in control of the conver-
sation even if something unexpected occurs. These are the kinds of skills
that a language examinee will find particularly useful at an oral exam, and
the following two exercises were indeed very much welcomed by our
students on examination preparation courses.
Avoiding giving information
The teacher addresses a student with a question that asks for specific
information, for example, ‘How old are you?’ The student must respond
This task can be combined with a paraphrasing task: Sl must then explain
what the word in question means.
‘I don’t understand’
S2 tells Sl that he/she did not understand the whole utterance or
sentence, for example:
S2 I’m sorry but I don’t think I understood you. . . .
or I’m sorry but I couldn’t follow you . . . .
This time, Sl first repeats the sentence more slowly, but when that does
not help, and S2 asks again, Sl must paraphrase the whole sentence.