Communication Strategies in the Interlanguage of Galician Students of English: The Influence of Learner- and Task-Related Factors (1)‪.‬

This paper presents the development and results of an investigation carried out in order to identify the use that Galician learners of English as a foreign language make of communication strategies; it explains this use in relation to those factors suggested in the literature as having an influence on strategic behaviour: proficiency level and speaker's native language, contextual conditions and cognitive complexity of the task. An experiment was designed and conducted in order to obtain representative samples of oral production in English ready to be analysed in search of communication strategies. A total of 629 strategies were identified in the data, classified and submitted to quantitative and statistical analyses. The results of these analyses suggest that (1) proficiency level has a strong but not definitive influence on frequency and choice of strategies, (2) the different native languages of our subjects do not have a clear influence on their strategic behaviour, although further research seems to be needed in order to clarify this issue, (3) certain task-related factors such as cognitive complexity and interlocutor's role have a significant effect on the use that foreign language learners make of communication strategies.