Effective Communication Strategies for Language Learners

Communication strategies are the techniques a speaker uses to keep a conversation going when their linguistic resources fall short — when the exact word will not come, the tense is uncertain, or the idiom is simply unknown. Instead of stopping, the speaker paraphrases, describes the thing they cannot name, borrows a word from another language, asks the listener for help, or points. These are not signs of failure; they are what every competent speaker — native or not — does under real-time pressure. For a language learner they are the difference between a conversation that survives a gap and one that collapses into silence.

The concept was named by Elaine Tarone in 1977 and given its enduring shape by Claus Faerch and Gabriele Kasper in 1983. Both worked from a single observation: a learner's knowledge of the target language is always incomplete, yet communication cannot wait for that knowledge to be complete. Something has to bridge the gap between what a speaker wants to say and what they currently can say. Communication strategies are that bridge.

A typology of communication strategies

Tarone's (1977) taxonomy is still the reference map. It sorts the moves a learner makes when a word is missing into a small set of recognizable types:

Paraphrase — reworking the message with the resources you have. It splits into approximation (using a near-word: “ship” for “sailboat”), word coinage (inventing a plausible form: “airball” for “balloon”), and circumlocution (describing the thing: “the round thing you hit the ball with” for “racket”). Circumlocution is the workhorse strategy — with enough basic vocabulary you can talk your way around almost any missing word.
Borrowing / transfer — reaching into another language. This includes literal translation (calquing a phrase word-for-word from your first language) and language switch (dropping in the native-language word and hoping it is understood), plus foreignizing (giving a native word a target-language pronunciation).
Appeal for assistance — asking the interlocutor directly: “What do you call this?”, “How do you say…?”. Far from a weakness, this turns the gap into a mini language lesson and keeps the exchange collaborative.
Mime / non-verbal — gesture, drawing, pointing: using the body to carry meaning the words cannot.
Avoidance — the retreat option: topic avoidance (steering away from a subject you cannot handle) and message abandonment (starting a sentence, hitting the wall, and giving up mid-way).

Faerch and Kasper (1983) added the crucial organizing distinction that still frames the field. They divided the whole set into two families defined by what the speaker does with the original goal. Achievement (or compensatory) strategies keep the goal and find another route to it — paraphrase, circumlocution, borrowing, appeal, gesture all belong here; the speaker manipulates the available language to get the message across. Reduction strategies change the goal to fit the available language: functional reduction trims the meaning (you say less than you intended), and formal reduction retreats to the safe, well-drilled forms you are sure of. Avoidance is the visible face of reduction.

Strategic competence: why this belongs to knowing a language

Communication strategies are not a curiosity at the edge of language learning — they are one of the four pillars of what it means to know a language. In Michael Canale and Merrill Swain's (1980) model of communicative competence — the theoretical core of communicative language teaching — alongside grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse competence sits strategic competence: the ability to use verbal and non-verbal strategies to compensate for breakdowns in communication, whether those breakdowns come from gaps in the code or from performance conditions like fatigue and distraction.

Placing strategic competence in the model has a sharp consequence. It means that mastering communication strategies is not a substitute for “real” learning but a genuine component of proficiency — a proficient speaker is not one who never runs out of words, but one who never lets running out of words stop the conversation. It also means the strategies are testable and teachable in principle: an oral exam that rewards a candidate for describing a word they have forgotten is measuring strategic competence directly.

Achievement versus avoidance: the choice that shapes progress

The Faerch–Kasper split is not just descriptive; it is the most consequential fork a learner faces in the moment of difficulty. Reach a word you do not know, and you can either reach for the goal by another means (achievement) or quietly retreat (reduction). The two paths feel similar in the second they are chosen, but they compound in opposite directions.

Achievement strategies keep the learner in the interaction. Circumlocuting around a missing word produces more speech, invites the interlocutor to supply the target word, and generates exactly the kind of pushed output and negotiation of meaning that drives acquisition. Avoidance, by contrast, is self-limiting in a way that hides its own cost: the learner who steers around every hard topic never discovers what they cannot yet say, gets no feedback on it, and shrinks the conversation to fit today's vocabulary. Habitual avoidance is comfortable and quietly corrosive — it caps the ceiling of what the learner will ever attempt. This is why the single most useful disposition a learner can build is a bias toward achievement: treat every gap as something to talk through, not around.

Reduction is not always wrong — abandoning a doomed sentence to say something simpler and true can be the right call, and formal reduction to reliable forms buys fluency early on. The problem is only reduction as a default reflex, chosen out of fear rather than judgement.

How to practise: speak despite the gaps

Can strategies be taught, or does a learner simply transfer the ones they already use in their first language? This was a live debate through the 1990s. Zoltán Dörnyei (1995) argued the practical case: whatever the underlying cognition, explicit practice raises learners' willingness and ability to deploy strategies, and TESOL-style training in them improves fluency and reduces breakdowns. Eric Kellerman (1991) took the sceptical “minimalist” line — teach the learners more language, he argued, and the strategies, which are general problem-solving abilities they already possess, will take care of themselves. The pragmatic resolution most teachers reached: you may not need to teach the underlying skill, but you can very usefully teach the disposition to use it and dismantle the fear that suppresses it.

In practice that means building the habit of achievement over avoidance:

Rehearse circumlocution deliberately — pick a concrete noun, hide the word, and describe it until the listener guesses. This trains the reflex of talking around a gap rather than freezing at it.
Give yourself permission to be imperfect. The goal of a conversation is to be understood, not to be flawless. A learner who accepts approximate words and rough grammar keeps talking; a learner who waits for the perfect sentence stops.
Make the appeal for help a normal move — “How do you say…?” is not a confession of failure but a fast way to convert a gap into a remembered word.
Widen your usable base. Strategies work on top of language you already have — circumlocution needs a stock of everyday words and, above all, ready-made formulaic sequences you can deploy without assembling them word by word. The bigger and more automatic that base, the more room you have to improvise around what is missing.

What this means for language learning

The lasting lesson of communication-strategy research is a permission and a priority. The permission: you do not need to know everything before you speak — the gap is normal, and the working speaker is the one who has strategies for getting across it. The priority: build a bias toward achievement over avoidance, because that single disposition determines whether your speaking keeps growing or quietly plateaus. Strategies, though, are not a shortcut around vocabulary and grammar; they run on top of a base of usable language, and they buy the most freedom when that base is large and automatic. That is where deliberate study and communicative confidence meet: the same interaction that lets you practise talking through gaps — the heart of communicative language teaching and of Krashen's argument for comprehensible input — is most productive when your base of words and chunks is broad enough to improvise from. Taalhammer builds that base by practising full sentences and consolidating them with active recall and spaced repetition, so that when a gap opens in real conversation, you have both the resources to route around it and the confidence to keep talking.

Frequently asked questions

Isn't using communication strategies just avoiding real learning?

No — the opposite is usually true. Achievement strategies like circumlocution and appeal for help keep you in the conversation, produce more output, and pull useful feedback and vocabulary from your interlocutor, all of which drive acquisition. The move that avoids real learning is the other kind: avoidance and message abandonment, which shrink the conversation to what you already know. Strategic competence is one of the four components of communicative competence, not a detour around it.

What is the difference between achievement and reduction strategies?

Faerch and Kasper (1983) drew the line by what happens to your original goal. Achievement (compensatory) strategies keep the goal and find another way to reach it — you paraphrase, describe, borrow a word, or gesture. Reduction strategies change the goal to fit your language — you say less than you meant (functional reduction) or retreat to safe, well-drilled forms (formal reduction). Habitually reaching for reduction caps your progress; reaching for achievement expands it.

Can communication strategies actually be taught?

This was debated: Dörnyei (1995) showed that explicit practice increases learners' readiness to use strategies and improves fluency, while Kellerman (1991) argued they are general problem-solving skills learners already have and would rather see time spent on teaching more language. The practical middle ground is that even if the underlying ability transfers from your first language, training the habit of using it — and removing the fear of imperfect speech — reliably helps.

Sources

Elaine Tarone, “Conscious Communication Strategies in Interlanguage: A Progress Report”, in H. D. Brown, C. Yorio, R. Crymes (eds.), On TESOL '77, TESOL, 1977.
Claus Faerch, Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Strategies in Interlanguage Communication, Longman, 1983.
Michael Canale, Merrill Swain, “Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing”, Applied Linguistics 1(1), 1980.
Eric Kellerman, “Compensatory Strategies in Second Language Research: A Critique, a Revision, and Some (Non-)Implications for the Classroom”, in R. Phillipson et al. (eds.), Foreign/Second Language Pedagogy Research, Multilingual Matters, 1991.
Zoltán Dörnyei, “On the Teachability of Communication Strategies”, TESOL Quarterly 29(1), 1995.
Ellen Bialystok, Communication Strategies: A Psychological Analysis of Second-Language Use, Blackwell, 1990.