Abstract:

English education in the context of globalization requires the ability to communicate effectively by using alternative expressions when the exact words are not readily available. This skill is defined as strategic competence. There are limited studies of authentically constructed systems for evaluating these abilities through watching learners' actual use of these strategies in educational environments.

The authors concentrated on:
(a) using synonyms,
(b) adding explanations, and
(c) restructuring messages to convey what they wanted to say.

We created new speaking tasks and developed a web application to facilitate the implementation of these tasks in the classroom. The content of the task is such that learners are required to use strategies (a), (b), and (c) by asking them to describe the illustration “without using the words or expressions that they are expected to use when describing the content of the illustration in English” to observe whether or not they have the ability to use the strategies. This study's ultimate aim is to determine each strategy's developmental stage and to develop learning and assessment methods in detail. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the differences in the types of strategies used by high school and undergraduate students during this speaking task.

First, we categorized the types of strategies used by 21 high school students and 26 undergraduate students, who were about A1 to B1 on the CEFR, in their utterances in the speaking task of this study. For example, the following utterances were observed. In a task in which students were asked to describe a child playing with a toy robot without using the word "robot," some participants simply used the word "toy" (using synonyms), while others used the expression “the machine which is like people and which can walk on two feet” (adding explanations). In the task in which students were asked to describe a father cutting a whole cake for his children without using "cut", there were examples of utterances in which the word "divide" was used (using synonyms), and examples of utterances in which "prepare for teatime" was used (restructuring messages).

Next, we statistically analyzed the number of strategies used by high school and undergraduate students for each type of strategy and found the following three points, which imply the design of learning and evaluation methods for the strategies:
(1) Undergraduate students used more restructuring strategies than high school students.
(2) High school students used more synonym strategies than undergraduates.
(3) Undergraduate students used more explanation strategies than high school students.

Keywords:

Speaking Ability, Strategic Competence, Computer Assisted Language Learning, Task-based Language Teaching.