Focusing upon communication strategies encourages the student to take control of his or her learning and move towards autonomy. It is a way of improving motivation in students, because it teaches them how to monitor their spoken production and improve without the tutor's constant input. Research has shown that it is more beneficial to integrate such strategies into tasks and lessons, to inform the students of the value of such skills ('informed training', as opposed to 'blind training', which tends to result in non-transferability of the skill), and to focus only on one or two skills at a time. Descriptions of projects evaluating this kind of learner strategy training can be found in Wenden (1987: 163), who reports a great sense of achievement among students and reliable judgements about their own performance.

Strategies of relevance to spoken utterance are:

• self-monitoring;
• risk-taking exercises for increased fluency;
• topic manipulation (steering the conversation into more familiar areas);
• picking up and using an interlocutor's language;
• employing time-creating 'fillers';
• using idiomatic phrases;
• applying circumlocution or substitution (synonyms, paraphrase) to counter vocabulary deficiencies.

For further information on oral communication strategies see Grenfell and Harris (1999: 94-103), Wenden (1987), and Johnstone (1989). The techniques for classroom activities suggested in section 6.3 will include suggestions for building in communication strategies.

Activity 7