COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES USED TO DEAL WITH THE DIFFICULTIES SPEAKING ENGLISH BY EFL FIRST-YEAR AND SECOND-YEAR STUDENTS AT UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES, HUE UNIVERSITY

Abstract

The paper presents the research findings on the difficulties that first-year and second-year EFL students of English Department, University of Foreign Languages, Hue University often encountered in speaking English and the communication strategies they used to cope with those difficulties. The data were collected from the survey that was distributed directly to the EFL first-year and second-year students in the Speaking classes. The findings show that the major difficulties are lack of vocabulary, lack of structure, lack of confidence in communication, and lack of understanding of the speaker's words. For the strategies used, the 50 students who participated in the survey commonly use message reduction and alteration strategies when speaking, while message abandonment strategies are used the least in speaking English. For listening, nonverbal strategies are used frequently by first-year students, while getting the gist strategies are commonly used by students in the second year. And less active listener strategies are not used often by both first and second year students.