Oral Communication Strategies and Enhancers in Content-Based Academic English Discussion

Nakatani (2010) identified a variety of oral communication strategies and enhancers (OCS) for improved communicative performance in English language learning, and found that OCS usage affords several benefits in interaction.Following suit, the Rikkyo University Center for English Discussion Class incorporated a new set of "communication skills" in an effort to enhance the quality of communicative interaction in group discussion.Thus, this study looked at transcriptions of interaction in regular lessons and described communication skill usage in relation to OCS principles.Findings offer insight into future classroom approaches to facilitating OCS use in group-based academic English discussion. INTRODUCTIONGuided by the question on how to improve the quality of communicative interaction in a second language, Nakatani (2010) looked to communication strategies, traditionally defined as "any attempt by learners to overcome their difficulties and generate the TL [target language] to achieve communication goals in actual interaction" (p.118).Included are achievement strategies, reaching a goal through alternative means, and reduction strategies, when learners avoid solving communication breakdowns (Nakatani, 2010).Also included are the "Three Cs" of negotiated interaction: confirmation checks ("Do you mean it's not good?"),clarification checks ("Could you repeat that?"), and comprehension checks ("Do you understand?").The term oral communication strategies and enhancers (OCS) is coined in order to be distinguished from a psycholinguistic view of communication strategies, and to emphasize the goal of focusing on how learners use these strategies to resolve communication breakdown.In addition to negotiation, OCS also includes enhancers, defined as "strategies for developing and maintaining interaction" (Nakatani 2010, p. 119).These include time gaining strategies ("Let me see"), active response ("I see.Good idea."), and shadowing (repeating a speaker's utterance).Thus, Nakatani (2010) looked at low and high proficiency learners, observed OCS frequency in tasks, and measured performance in tests.It was concluded that high-proficiency learners use OCS more frequently, and that higher frequency may correlate to better performance, while low-frequency learners used OCS less frequently and scored lower on tests.Subsequent study on the matter reflect the higher OCS usage with high-proficiency learners (Metcalfe & Noom-Ura, 2013;Pawlak, 2015; Kongsom, 2015;Nurdini, 2017;Almaktary, 2018).Concerning interactional dynamics, Burch (2014) observed through conversational analysis that learners use multiple strategies at the same time.Most relevant to the context of the present study, Benson, Fischer, Geluso, and Von Joo (2013) looked at the context of small-group discussion and observed that an experimental group that was taught OCS strategies used them more frequently than the control group.Influenced by such findings, Rikkyo University's Center for English Discussion Class introduced a new set of "communication skills" to the curriculum to better reflect strategic competence (Schaefer, 2018).These communication skills reflect the Three Cs and enhancers, but are divided into speaker/listener roles (Appendix A).The communication skills differ from traditional target language in the sense that the aim is to afford the production of ideas in discussion rather than the learning of the items themselves (Hurling, 2012).Therefore, of most interest to this study is the correlation between proficiency level and OCS frequency, and how learners use OCS strategies in small-group discussion.