A New Approach to Communication Strategies: The Case of Iranian EFL Teachers

This study focuses on the use of communication strategies in teacher talk. While previous studies have presented communication strategies largely from an outside researcher's perspective, the aim in this paper is to move the focus to that of classroom contexts, especially EFL teaching contexts. Furthermore, it is argued that communication strategies should also be studied in the situated talk of the classroom teacher, and not just second language learners. Showing some examples from our database, we underscore the crucial role these devices play in classroom interaction. The participants were five non-native Iranian teachers. The data consisted of a total of fifteen recordings, made up of three lessons for each teacher. The detailed examination of the database revealed that the teachers in the study made frequent use of different types of communication strategy in their talk with students and these strategies were potentially an important aspect of teacher talk. The most important implications of this finding are that, first, an extended concept of communication strategies that moves beyond learners to include teachers' communication strategies should be taken into account and, second, developing these strategies are necessary for effective L2 communicative language use.