‘Free’ to Choose: Communication Strategy Use in EFL Classrooms in Iran

This study investigated six English lessons from the learners’ textbooks at a private language institute in Shiraz, Iran, to assess the use of Communication Strategies (CSs) in open-ended conversation tasks. The participants were 30 pairs of English learners (N=60) divided into elementary, intermediate, and advanced proficiency levels. Conversations were recorded and transcribed and the final assessment of the data was made using both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The results showed that the frequency of CSs was relatively low, compared with previous studies on EFL learners in other contexts. Indeed, no significant difference was found between the three groups vis-à-vis the total number of CSs used. However, it was found that elementary-level students frequently used the strategies which impeded the flow of their communication. On the other hand, advanced students mostly employed strategies to maintain the flow of interaction. Nevertheless, no group could adequately use self-solving strategies such as circumlocution and approximation for target language (TL) vocabularies. The results indicated that while a small number of students could use CSs for conversation tasks; it is necessary to introduce explicit meta-cognitive strategy training to raise awareness of CS use in order to further expand TL development.