The Effects of Task Type on Learners’ use of Communication Strategies

This paper presents results from a study conducted to undestand the use of communication strategies by Algerian students of EFL. Based on Tarone's (1983) interactional taxonomy of communication strategies and Bialystok's (1983) tripartite division into L1- based, IL-based and non-verbal based strategies, the investigation also sought to examine the effects of task types on the use of communication startegies. For this purpose, a group of second year university students were observed during the performance of two different communicative tasks: picture description task and free discussion task. The results demonstrated that to solve their communication problems, the students employed a wide variety of communication strategies drawing upon different sources of knowledge. Thus, they relied on their interlanguages, mother tongue, other mastered foreign languages or paralanguage. The results also revealed that task type had significat effects on the number(quantity) of communication strategies but not on the type (quality) of communication strategies used by the participants.To explain the phenomenon, three factors in relation with the nature of the two tasks were discussed: task demands, context and time constraints.