Peter Skehan - A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO LANGUAGE LEARNING

Strategic Competence This situation is not particularly different with respect to

the operation of strategic competence and communication strategies, the other
more general framework which might provide a rationale for output-led
interlanguage development. This literature (Tarone 1981: Feach and Kasper 1983;
Bialytok 1990) has examined the ways in which the strategies that learners adopt
when faced by communication problems can be described clearly and classified.
Many categorization systems have been proposed, such as Faerch and Kaspers
(1983) distinction between achievement and avoidance strategies, and Bialystoks
(1990) contrast between linguistic and cognitive factors. One attraction of such
systems is that they account for the range of strategies which are used as
parsimoniously and yet comprehensively as possible. In addition, it is useful if they
can be grounded in related fields.
A different ways of examining essentially the same point is to consider the
relationship between communication strategies and the Canale and Swain (1980)
model of communicative competence. This contains three (Canale and Swain 1980)
or four (Canale 1983) competencies: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, and
strategic (discourse being the added fourth competence: see the discussion
McNamara 1995). Linguistic, Sociolinguistic, and discourse competences are, in a
sense, more basic, since they represent areas of coherent competence in relation to
different aspects of communication. Strategic competence, in this formulation, has a
less integrated quality in that is meant to function in an improvisatory manner when
problems are encountered because other competences are lacking. (See Bachman
1990) and Chapter 7). Presumably, the capacity to negotiate meaning would be part
of a more general strategic competence.
A weak interpretation of what is happening would be that such strategies have no
other function than to solve some sort of communication breakdown in order that
conversation can proceed. With this interpretation, all that happens when a problem
is encountered is that some degree of resourcefulness is drawn on, and the problem
is question may or may not be solved. In this view, it is not assumed that there is
much trace from activity of solving the problem in question. Although the solution
may enable further interaction to take place (which is, of course, not a bad thing),
its details are regarded as transitory and unimportant.
However, a stronger interpretation is that when communication strategies are used,
they have implications for longer-term language development. There are three
requirements for this to happen. First, it is necessary that solving current
communicative problems leaves some sort of trace. In other words, what is initially
an improvisation to convey ones meaning when resources are limited is noticed
and becomes more transitory but evanescent success; there must be something
about the interaction which is sufficiently salient, and/or the processing capacity
available allows such attention. Second, the improvisation which has become a
solution must be useful to future problems it must have some transfer or
generalizing power. Such an outcome would reflect the way the interaction itself has
led to useful hypothesis generation or to syntactic processing (Swain 1985;1995).
Third, the communicative solution needs to become proceduralized, either because
it is so striking during one occurrence (Logan 1988), or because its strength is built
up more gradually through repeated related solutions to essentially the same
communicative problem (Anderson 1992). In any case, it becomes available as part
of ones communicative repertoire on subsequent occasions when problems similar
to the original one are encountered. If all these conditions are met, and
interlanguage development occurs, then we do indeed have a case of learning to
talk by talking. In this case solving communicative problems engages a language
learning capacity directly, since solving problems is what puts pressure on the
communicative system to change.