Liskin, Gasparro, Judith (1996). Circumlocution, Communication Strategies, and the
ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines: An Analysis of Student Discourse. Foreign
Language Annals, 29 (3), 317-330.
Purpose of Study: Investigate the use of communication strategies, more specifically, circumlocution, by Intermediate-High and Advanced speakers of
Spanish (during an OPI) to determine what strategies were preferred by which level of speakers. Finally, the study sought to determine if the ACTFL guidelines for each level accurately reflected the strategies employed by speakers on the OPI.
Research Questions
1.
How do Intermediate High and Advanced speakers of Spanish cope with lexical gaps? a.
Early research focused largely on classifying communication strategies used (Váradi 1973; Tarone 1978, 1980, 1983; Bialystok and
Frohlich 1980; Faerch and Kasper 1980, 1983, 1984; Paribakht 1985). b.
Controversy over classifying these strategies centered around whether or not they were interactional (Tarone 1983) or as “surface manifestations of psycholinguistic processes” (Faerch and Kasper
1983).
2.
Is there a relationship between the communication strategy selected and the proficiency level of the speaker? a.
The preference of certain CSs changes with increased proficiency
(Paribakht 1985; Bialystok 1983) b.
Less proficient speakers produce more CSs than advanced speakers
(Poulisse and Schils 1989)
3.
Do the lexical repair strategy data gathered from OPIs of intermediate High and Advanced speakers corroborate the statements about use of communication strategies, particularly circumlocution, in the ACTFL guidelines? a.
Circumlocution tends to be used when naming items when there is no time limitation nor interlocutor present (Poulisse and Schils 1989)
Methodology
 Target form:
 Participants: 30 OPIs
 Groups: 17 Intermediate-High and 13 advanced o All were students of the 1989 Middlebury College Spanish School total immersion summer program o Nationality, native language, and sex are unknown
 Assessment instruments o Researcher listened to OPI recordings and transcribed all instances where participants employed communication strategies o Strategies employed were classified first broadly as either L1-based or L2-based (based on Bialystock 1989)

 More specifically, L1 Activities included
(Borrowing/Achievement strategies):
 Transliteration/Foreignizing (T/F): “literal recoding from another language of a word that does not exist in
Spanish”
 Language Switch/ Code-switching (LS): Use of a word from L1 (or L3, in some instances) with no attempt to translate
 Appeal for Assistance (AA): Speaker asks interlocutor for help, either directly or indirectly
 Paraphrasing Strategies (L2-based)
 Approximation (AP): Speaker uses a term that is semantically related to the target word, but is not exactly correct
 Circumlocution/Description (C/D): Use of Spanish to describe an item missing from one’s lexicon
 Message Reconstruction (MR): Speaker starts a sentence over again after encountering difficulty
 Word Coinage (WC): Speaker makes up a word whose basis is in words from L2 (i.e. durado for hardened)
 Avoidance strategies
 Message avoidance / Message abandonment (MA) o Meaning of the message is lost, speaker stops trying to convey meaning
Results
 Intermediate-High speakers favored L1 based CSs over L2-based (.52 and .36, respectively)
 The opposite was evident for Advanced speakers, who preferred L2-based strategies over L1-based (.56 and .44)
 A T-test of the data sets indicated that the Intermediate-High speakers’ preference for L1 based strategies was statistically insignificant, but the
Advanced speakers’ preference of L2-based strategies was in fact statistically significant.
 Within L1-based CSs, Intermediate-High speakers utilized T/F and LS more than did Advanced Speakers
 Advanced speakers used more often CSs that facilitated the conveyance of their meaning more clearly
Discussion
 There is an emerging trend for Advanced speakers to employ more L2-based strategies
 The author finds it interesting that circumlocution is the CS most commonly referred to by the ACTFL proficiency guidelines, but the rate of C/D in the groups was nearly identical in the two groups (.14 for Intermediate-High, .16

for Advanced). However, the author did not analyze the quality of circumlocution, rather, if it was employed or not
 Based on this, the author suggests that upon crossing the Intermediate-
High/Advanced threshold, the tendency is to use more L2-based strategies in general, and not necessarily any specific strategies
 The author suggests that Advanced speakers do not entirely abandon L1 based strategies, only they add to their repertoire more L2 based strategies
 Discussion of Research Questions o RQ1: Speakers use communication strategies based either in the L1 or the L2 to overcome lexical gaps o RQ2: While the proficiency level of the speaker did not indicate
specific strategies used to overcome lexical gaps, the author notes an emerging trend for Advanced speakers to employ more L2-based communication strategies.
 Additionally, the number of CSs produced was much higher for
Intermediate-High speakers (42 total) than Advanced speakers
(25) o RQ3: In the data-set studied, circumlocution use was virtually the same between the two groups. The author also notes that for the
Guidelines to limit their discussion of CSs to circumlocution is slightly misleading because speakers employ a wide-variety of CSs to work through lexical gaps.
 Also, the Guidelines does not define circumlocution, the author feels that it is possible that raters of the OPIs could interpret this differently
Author-Stated Limitations
 Small sample (n = 30), thus results should be treated as “emerging trends” rather than conclusive evidence
 Further study is needed to assess how the OPI affects CS use because the author postulates that the monolingual stance taken by OPI raters could bias students towards L2-based strategies, thus not truly reflecting their linguistic abilities in the L2
Observations
 The author did not investigate quality of CS use, instead she focused on simple occurrences. I think it would be relevant to define the level of the CS employed because this can affect a speaker’s ability to convey meaning