Abstract:

Researchers claim that the gap between education, training and employment can be narrowed through the development of academic and employment skills such as motivation, time management, literacy and communication competence (see [1]). For the past decades, there have been a number of studies on teaching communication strategies (CS) to EFL learners. M. Rost suggests that “one of the main purposes of CS instruction is to help learners anticipate and deal with conversation management problems, not to prevent or avoid them” [2]. M. Ogane proposed the guidelines for teaching CS (paraphrasing, borrowing from L1, miming, asking for help, avoiding) along with classroom techniques and specific exercises [3].

Teaching effective CS (see [4]) to the 2nd-to-4th-year students is regarded as a stimulating and beneficial experience to develop relevant communication skills relying on social setting analysis and proceeding to practising the suggested communication patterns.
Any communication script relies on a wide assortment of relevant parameters which define the communication pattern and the choice of vocabulary to be employed (see [4]).

These are:
1) social setting – it can be roughly classified into three basic types: informal; semi-formal; formal;
2) degree of familiarity between the participants to communication act;
3) the target group and social ranks of the participants to communication act;
4) goals the participants are pursuing [4].

The practising format is based on role-play, brainstorming and teamwork. To successfully participate in the role-play students rely on the following steps: defining the objective; making up a script; distributing roles with briefing to follow on each role; practising the role play [4]. Then the students proceed to practising the suggested communication pattern relying on a variety of CS: Initiating discussion, Thinking of Ideas, Supporting the View, Adding Arguments to Reinforce the Idea, etc. (for more strategies see [4]).

The paper features a step-by-step strategy of instilling and promoting CS in the educational environment for professional purposes. The outlined strategy stimulates students and boosts their communication skills – in the reflexive essays assessing the CS ESL potential they admit that they do enjoy the practises as a chance to rehearse communication skills in a safe environment, learn and practise relevant vocabulary stock, develop creative problem-solving skills as well as oral presentation skills, ability to structure information flow, support the view, prioritize, arrange the arguments in the logical order, etc. Thus, this strategy stands out among other classroom activities integrated into the educational environment and adapted to be used in teaching.

References:
[1] Bridging the Gap between Education and Employment: English Language Instruction in EFL Contexts (R. Al-Mahrooqi, C. Denman eds.), Peter Lang AG, 2015.
[2] M. Rost, “Helping Learners Develop Communication Strategies,” The Language Teacher, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 41−43, 1996.
[3] M. Ogane, Teaching Communication Strategies. 1998. ERIC document (ED 419384).
[4] O.A. Suleimanova, K.S. Kardanova, N.N. Beklemesheva, N.V. Lyagushkina, V.I. Yaremenko, English Communication Perspectives: in 2 books. Book 1. Moscow: Akademiya, 2013.

Keywords:

Communication skills, communication strategies, role-play, teamwork, brainstorming.