An Investigation into the Use of Oral Communication Strategies by Senior Kurdish EFL University Students

The use of Oral Communication Strategies (OCSs) by Senior Kurdish EFL (English as a Foreign Language) university students to overcome communication breakdowns and the thoughts of their instructors in this regard was the center of focus in this study. A thirty-three-item questionnaire was given to the students from different Iraqi Kurdistan Region universities; they were chosen through stratified sampling. Moreover, the instructors’ opinions on their students’ communication and communication strategies were uncovered through a semi-structured interview. The quantitative data were analyzed by Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (IBM SPSS) 26.0 software and thematic analysis was used in analyzing the interviews. The results showed that the Kurdish EFL students employed most of the strategies with different ranges and the most widely used group of strategies were interactional strategies. Furthermore, the t-test outcome suggested that there were not significant relationship between the use of OCSs by male and female students. The results of the study require instructors and curriculum designers to include OCSs in their classes more, directly or indirectly, to guarantee better learning outcomes since the students always attempt to have better oral communication.


Introduction
Communication as a process is used to share information, ideas and feelings through employing symbols for sending/receiving messages occurring in a context with some effect and feedback opportunity (Verderber, 1994;Samovar & Mills, 1998;Santon, 2004, Baldwin et al., 2014;DeVito, 2018).In a normal conversation, speech communication happens in an environment with a mixture of conversations of the other speakers and immediate sounds in the environment (Miller et al., 1995).To provide a comprehensive understanding of communication in everyday life, Duck and McMahan (2018) mention seven of its major characteristics as: symbolic, requiring meaning, cultural, relational, involving frames, both presentational and representational, and transaction.Speaking requires plenty of mental processes that for language learners might not function ideally in the case of language learners who want to have a fluent and accurate speech.Thus, hesitation, break, and other forms of complication can be found in the speech of language learners (Goh& Burns, 2012).In an EFL/ESL (English as a Second Language) context, the concept of communication is connected with a number of issues.Hedge (2000) claims that when language learners do not have sufficient background knowledge, they tend to use strategies called communication strategies.In addition, Corder (1981) defines communicative strategies as "a systematic technique employed by a speaker to express his meaning when faced with some difficulty".By difficulty, he refers to expressing insufficient ability of the target language speaker used in the conversation.To Tarone, communication strategy was two interlocutors attempt to share an agreement on the meaning of certain expression when the intended linguistic and sociolinguistic meaning was not found (1980).Additionally, Grenfell and Harris (1999) point out that communication strategies are instruments owned by learners for making sense of face-to-face conversations and surviving communication breakdowns.As Corder (1981) emphasizes, communication strategies are employed by all the speakers, native and non-native.Hence, no one can deny that communication strategies are used by Kurdish EFL university students since, as Long (1983) claims, these strategies help them avoiding troubles in conversation and it is obvious that, as Bygate (1987) points out, learners tend to use oral communication strategies when they do not have target language mastery.The current study aimed at answering the following research questions: A) What are the OCSs used by Kurdish EFL learners?B) What are the mostly used strategies?C) What is the role of gender in using strategies?D) What are the thoughts of instructors about their students' communication and strategy use?

Oral Communication Strategies
The source of academic development of many second and/or foreign language learners can be associated with speaking as it has a positive role in learners' language acquisition (Goh & Burns, 2012).As Perrin and Kleinberger (2017) have explained, the world can be a more predictable and manageable place through a successful communication.
On the contrary, misunderstandings accompanied by lacking comprehension might cause well-expected collaborations become complicated if not unworkable.Through the results of his study, Törnqvist (2008) indicates that oral communication is a vital component of English teaching both for instructors as well as learners.This claim is supported by the fact that nowadays to have the ability of oral self-expression is significant and makes students employ the target language mainly by themselves.Furthermore, Murphy (1991) considers oral communication to be a combination of interrelated processes of language and paying attention to a single section requires focus to others simultaneously.According to Nugroho (2019), communication strategies are one of the main factors in the development process of the speaking skill of learners.Nakatani (2005) believes that strategies of oral communication pay attention to oral interaction and negotiation behavior of interlocutors to cope with breakdowns of communication.As Putri (2013) states, these strategies are thought to have a straightforward impact on the process of communication and second language acquisition through having an open channel between learners for providing input.

Taxonomies
According to Floyd (2018) Dörnyei & Scott's classification which consists of: direct strategies as resource deficit-related strategies {message abandonment, message reduction, message replacement, circumlocution, approximation}, use of allpurpose words {word-coinage, restructuring, literal translation, foreignizing, code switching}, use of similar-sounding words{mumbling, omission, retrieval, mime}, own-performance problem-related strategies {self-rephrasing, self-repair}, other-performance problemrelated strategies and other-repair (1997).While interactional strategies are resource deficit-related strategies (appeals for help), own-performance problem-related strategies (comprehension check, own-accuracy check), other-performance problem-related strategies (asking for repetition, asking for clarification, asking for confirmation, guessing, expressing non-understanding, interpretive summary, and responses).Finally, Dörnyei and Scott (1997) mentioned indirect strategies such as processing time pressure-related strategies (use of fillers, repetitions), own-performance problem-related strategies (verbal strategy markers), other-performance problem-related strategies (feigning understanding).In their review Dörnyei and Scott provided an inventory of strategic language devices which included the names of 33 strategies with their definitions, example and more detail (1997).This last inventory is adopted and adapted for data collection in the current study.

Previous Studies
A number of different studies have been conducted regarding communication strategies in various educational contexts.To reveal its significance, the current study reviews four studies: Yaman and Özcan (2015), Maldonado (2016), Nurwahyuningsih et al. (2019), and Daudi (2019).
In their study, Yaman and Özcan (2015) focus on the most common oral communication strategies used by EFL Turkish students.The researchers employ Turkish culture specifically developed Strategy Inventory of Oral Communication (SIOC) which was given to 294 participants (217 female and 77 male) of Mersin University's ELT Department.
Beside the strategy type, the impact of language proficiency level and gender are also taken into consideration.SPSS, descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test and also the Mann-Whitney U test, one-way ANOVA Tests are used for data analysis.The results display that the students mainly used negotiation for meaning and compensatory strategies with proficiency having no affective role while gender to be source of great difference.Moreover, to achieve best outcomes in conversations and overcoming communication breakdowns, the study recommends teaching strategies to EFL students.Through having a descriptive, correlational and cross-sectional study with quantitative and qualitative research methods, Maldonado (2016) focuses on the impact of proficiency level on the use of strategies by Spanish learners of English at Chilean universities.The study depends on three informal conversations outside classroom between 9 selected students (3 male and 6 female) and a native speaker and a post interview to confirm the results and Dörnyei and Körmos' taxonomy (1998) is adapted to evaluate them.The study concludes that lower level students use communication strategies more comparing to higher proficiency level students.Nurwahyuningsih et al. (2019) have conducted a qualitative descriptive study to investigate the communication strategies used by Indonesian ELT students in advanced speaking classroom activities.For data collection, video and audio recorders are used in observing a 35-student classroom observation and interviewing 4 students; conversational analysis is used for the data obtained from the later tool.The researchers find out that fourteen communication strategies divided in three categories of direct, indirect and interactional strategies are frequently used and some new strategies derived from the context (i.e., fillers, self-repetition, self-repair, codeswitching, and asking for repetition) are also the same.This could be helpful for learners who intend to learn a new language.Finally, in order to pay much attention to types and frequency of oral communication strategies, Daudi (2019) has collected 107 responses from Algerian EFL university students using a questionnaire.The quantitative data is collected through adopting Nakatani's 32 items in 8 categories of Inventory of Oral Communication Strategy and analyzed through descriptive statistics.Achievement strategies; accuracy-based strategies, social affective strategies and fluency-oriented strategies are found to be employed to overcome speaking difficulties.In addition, the researcher uses these results to derive at the conclusion about the effect of teaching communication strategies as a part of teaching curriculum to raise EFL learners' awareness.

The Study Instruments
Mackey and Gass (2012) state that questionnaire is the most widely used approach of collecting more data with considerable cost and in a shorter limit of time.To collect the present study data, both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed.The quantitative data is gathered by means of a 33item Likert scale questionnaire with five options, namely never, rarely, sometimes, often, and always which is given to the students of four different universities of Iraqi Kurdistan region (i.e., University of Sulaimani, Salahaddin University-Erbil, University of Duhok, and University of Halabja).In order to have more accurate data, another instrument is used to support the first one.Hence, the qualitative data is collected through conducting a semistructured interview with eleven university instructors.

Participants and Sampling
Population of the quantitative data is 372 senior students and the sample size of 200 participants is chosen; 132 female and 68 male students answer the questionnaire as shown in Table 1.The participants are classified through probability sampling and stratified sampling is used to collect the survey data.For the qualitative part, 11 instructors (i.e., MA and PhD holders) from four public universities in the Iraqi Kurdistan region are interviewed through non-probability, purposive sampling.Using oneon-one interview, the very well-known research approach of qualitative data collection and telephone interview is used with those instructors who are living far from the researcher (Creswell, 2012).Table 1 Distribution of the Participants of the Quantitative Data

Reliability and Validity
Although measuring validity is not an easy task, yet for the test of content validity, the tools and items of the study are evaluated by 12 jury members from a number of national and international universities (e.g., Sulaimani, Utah State, Salahaddin-Erbil, Duhok, Al-Hamdaniya, Mosul, Charmo, Diyala, and Newroz).The jurors' comments, suggestions, recommendations, and notes are taken into consideration for the final version of the questionnaire and interview (cf.Kothari, 2004).The questionnaire items are tested for reliability which is "an instrument is the degree of consistency with which it measures whatever it is purported to measure" (Ary et al., 2014, p. 253).The inter-item correlations for internal consistency are analyzed through Chronbach alpha, as shown in Table 2, and the result is 0.807 where 0.80-0.90 is considered highly reliable (Cohen et al., 2018) Table 2 Reliability of the Questionnaire

Results and Data Analysis
The quantitative part of the study is analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 26.0 for the following: descriptive statistics, frequency, mean, mode, independent T-test.While for the qualitative part thematic analysis is employed.The interviews are transcribed, coded and then the themes and sub-themes were found.

Research Question One: What are the oral communication strategies used by Kurdish EFL learners?
In order to find the OCSs used by Kurdish EFL senior university students, frequency and percentage for each item of the student questionnaire are calculated.CSs used are divided in the three types: direct, interactional, and indirect strategies, as suggested by (Dörnyei & Scott, 1997).
a. Direct Strategies The results of the frequency given in Table 3 for the direct strategies shows that 88 participant of the study claim their use of message abandonment sometimes, 141 to be using approximation often or always.On the other hand, 31.0%and 23% of the respondents respond with never and rarely for using foreignizing as an oral communication strategy respectively.Table 3 The Frequency and Percentage of Direct Strategies b.Interactional Strategies Table 4 shows the frequency and percentage of the interactional OCSs used by the participants.According to the results presented, 79 participants claim to be using "asking for clarification" as an OCS often times.Meanwhile, the scores for never and rarely used strategies are between 4.0% and 21.0% for all the interactional strategies.

Table 4 The Frequency and Percentage of Interactional Strategies c. Indirect Strategies
The third category of strategies used by Kurdish EFL university students is indirect strategies.The following table reveals that 59 of the respondents claim using fillers sometimes and 49 show more usage by answering as always.Nevertheless, only 5.5 % select as never using feigning understanding as a strategy in their oral communication.

Table 5 The Frequency and Percentage of Indirect Strategies
Research Question Two: What are the mostly used strategies?After calculating the mode for every item of the questionnaire, it is found that there are only one strategy with the mode of "always" and it was self-repair with the mean of 3.69.Meanwhile, the mode often with the given means were chosen for circumlocution: 3.43, approximation: 3.83, non-linguistic strategies: 3.75, guessing: 3.58, asking for repetition: 3.59, asking for clarification: 3.78, indirect appeal for help: 3.18, and interpretive summary: 3.31.The mode of "never" was highlighted in foreignizing only with 2.41 as the mean.Consider the following table 6.

Table 6 Mean and Mode of the OCSs Used by Kurdish EFL University Students
Research Question Three: What is the role of gender in using strategies?An independent-sample t-test is conducted Tables 7 and 8 to compare the use of oral communication strategies for male and female respondents."t-test is used to discover whether there are statistically significant differences between the means of two groups" (Cohen et al., 2018).There is a significant difference (t= -0.021, df= 198, two-tailed p= 0.983) in the score for Male (M= 98.073, SD= 12.216) and female (M= 98.113, SD= 12.665).The magnitude of difference in the means (mean difference= -0.040, 95%CI: -3.724 to 3.643) is not significant.

Research Question Four: What are the thoughts of instructors about their students' communication and strategy use?
As it is shown in Table 9, all of the interviewed instructors (i.e., n.11) claim that communication is important to the students.
L8: I believe it is very, very important for the students to be able to communicate in the target language that they're actually learning.That's why for me, in my classes, it is a must.

It's because learning doesn't happen unless they understand what's going on or what I'm actually talking about what I'm explaining
because we are obliged to do all the explanation in English because we teach English so we have to do it all in the target language.So if the students don't understand and cannot communicate in the target language, then this will be a very problematic barrier in front of learning the second language.72.7% of the instructors state that they do not have enough time to practice communication in the classroom and they use alternative strategy and techniques to overcome this problem.
L 2: One of them is distributing students in groups.And when I ask for who wants to participate, I don't oblige them at the beginning.Those who try to say something at that.After that, I ask some other students to participate.So sometimes I bring some exercises that they're interested in.For example, I say, we follow this book, but sometimes I asked in which exercise are you interested in?I try to bring that topic because in this way, the students will be more motivated to participate in the class with us.L 10: Actually, sometimes I take time from those students who are good and give that time to those who are not that good.So yes, we don't have enough time but we just try to actually compensate, taking from the time of good students and giving it to other poor students.
Concerning the students' attempts to improve their language ability, the majority of the instructors (i.e., 9 out of 11) have a positive perspective in this regard.L5: I could say yes, because I can see the differences and the improvement of their English.If I compare the same students at the beginning of the year, and the same student in the beginning, at the end of the year, I can say, yes, they try to, to improve their proficiencies in all levels.Yet only 18.18% of the instructors claim that their students do not try as much as required.This indicates that they have a negative perspectives towards their students' ability of improvement.L4: They're passive.But in general, I can say they're passive.Like, if the instructor does not urge them, or let's say, force them to talk, or if the instructor is not too serious, students want to just to sit back and wait for the class time to pass and without participation, actually, they need.So they need strict regulations, strict monitoring, and actually it's the responsibility of the instructor to make them participate in the classroom.That's the fact.Even the smart, clever students who have good language ability they refuse to speak and participate in classroom communication.
Generally speaking, the Kurdish EFL university instructors' responses to the need for teaching communication strategies is positive with different approaches of direct and indirect each suggested by almost half of the participants.L3: What I prefer is that the instructor should include these strategies in his or her teaching directly or indirectly because the instructor is a good model for the students.So I prefer that the teaching of strategies should be indirect should be included in instructors' teaching.Table 9 Number of Reference and Percentage of Interview Themes and Subthemes

Discussions
As presented in the results, Kurdish EFL university students reported using various communication strategies in their spoken performance.All of the direct strategies are reported to be used by half or even more of the participants except for forignising.Kurdish EFL learners use these direct strategies for getting the meaning as they are self-contained and adaptable.The second category of strategies is interactional strategies, which has the least number of negative answers and all of its strategies are claimed to be used.These strategies are employed to arrive at shared meaning between the speaker and interlocutors.Mutual understanding is aimed to be achieved and breakdown in communication is to be avoided by all means that is why it mainly focuses on problem solving.Lastly indirect strategies used are use of fillers, selfrepetition, feigning understanding and verbal strategy markers.Here the Kurdish EFL learners work hand in hand with their interlocutors to hold a successful conversation.asking for confirmation, and using fillers are the most used strategies.Because in Kurdish community how others perceive you is of high consideration.Kurdish EFL learners try their best to talk in a way that is understood by their partners and do their part in keeping the conversation from any breakdowns.
The results of the independent sample T-test revealed that there were no statistically significant differences between male and female Kurdish EFL university students in the use of OCSs.These results agree with the findings of the instructors' interview in which most of them stated that they had not noticed such a difference between male and female students (Demir, 2018;Huang, 2010).This could be due various reasons such as equal chance of self-expression to both genders, mental and social changes in terms what is expected to be achieved by the students which is regardless of their gender.On the other hand, these results of gender as a point of difference in the case of OCSs is tackled by many researchers, Berryman- and Yaman and Özcan (2015), among many others, state that such difference between male and females exist.
Although all the instructors who took part in this study support the importance of communication and confirm that they try their best to meet the needs of their students to communicate in the class, yet the majority claim that they do not have enough time to allow students to take part in oral discussions they are interested in.They also state that having different proficiency levels in the same class is challenging and requires more class time.The instructors also mention some of the strategies their students use while speaking.All the instructors agree on the need of familiarizing

Conclusions
Building on the study results and discussion, one can confirm that Kurdish EFL university students use many different communication strategies for escaping issues and difficulties they have in their language usage while speaking.The strategies used by them are of three categories: direct, interactional and indirect.However, it is also found that interactional strategies are used the most as compared to the others.The use of these strategies varies depending on the gender of the speaker.In Kurdish EFL context, at the university level, gender is not a point of difference in strategy use.Female and male Kurdish EFL learners reported using OCSs with the same frequency.The interviewed instructors shed light on various issues concerning students share in communication.
They confirmed the importance of students' participation in communication activities and their positive attempts towards improvement.Although they assured considering the needs of their students, they mentioned challenges they face as lack of time and having mixed proficiency level classes.And after all, to overcome those challenges it is suggested that teaching CSs should be incorporated in EFL classrooms in departments of English in the Iraqi Kurdistan region.

Recommendations
1. Providing enough time to speaking and conversation classes can improve the students communication since they are given much time to practice English inside the classroom.2. To overcome the communication failure, Departments of English at Iraqi Kurdistan Region universities can assess the students' proficiency level and divide them into groups according to what they perform during the assessment process.This enhances their ability and helps the instructors in selecting communication topics, exercise, etc. 3. Departments of English should reform and/or update their curricula in accordance with the students' needs.4. Teachers who teach speaking and/or conversation should inform their students about OCSs and teach them in a practical way.This makes the students more familiar with the strategies and helps them to overcome the challenges they face in their oral communication.

Table 7
Gender Group Statistics for Male and Female Participants

Table 8
Independent Sample T-test for Gender Difference in Using Strategies.