The Relationship Between Proficiency Level And the Use of Communicative Strategies

The study described in this paper was set up to investigate the effect of foreign language learners proficiency level on cornmunicative strategies used by these learners to solve their lexical problems. The study involved two groups of Persian EFL learners at two different proficiency levels. The subjects were tested on one task, that is picture naming, and the strategies used by them were finally identified and analyzed. It appeared that "proficiency level" is inversely related to both number and type of communicative strategies used by the subjects. The high proficiency group resorted to fewer but linguistic and context - based strategies (which are basically dependent on the target language knowledge ) whereas the low proficiency group resorted to more but knowledge based, repetition , paralinguistic , avoidance , Lt based and some L2 based CSs. These findings suggest a positive relationship between language proficiency level and the use of communicative strategies. The closer the learner gets to a native-like competence, the more linguistic based CSs he/she uses, but at the same time he employs fewer number of CSs to express his/her intended meaning