Focus on the form versus focus on the message in lingua franca conversation

Abstract

The present article looks at the speech of two Estonian twelfth-grade students in an informal conversation in English. The aim of the article is to characterise the speech of these two non-native speakers of English in terms of the communication strategies used and their effectiveness as judged by the further progress of the conversation. It is observed that the student who normally gets good marks at school considers correct linguistic forms to be important, but at the same time she also has difficulties with using effective communication strategies when production problems arise in a conversation. The second student focuses primarily on conveying his message clearly and, when language-related difficulties occur, he skilfully employs effective communication strategies such as restructuring, circumlocution, approximation, word coinage etc. It is concluded that in order to communicate in a foreign language successfully, it is sometimes not enough to have a good command of the language and adequate amount of practice, some learners may also gain from explicit instruction in communication strategy, which can motivate them to be more active and fluent speakers of the target language.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5128/ERYa8.18