Difficulties obstructing communications between different interlocutors, the strategies to overcome them and the language learners’ pragmatic competence have been investigated extensively in research, both in the classroom context and in other institutional settings. However, far less is known about the oral communication difficulties between native and non-native speakers of English in the informal context in the free social space.
For practical reasons, this project is designed to include two separate studies, both relevant to the same problem: oral communication difficulties (CDs) between Sudanese EFL speakers in the UK and their peer English native interlocutors in their daily conversations.
Firstly, in the first study, twenty Sudanese learners of English were interviewed to report the communication difficulties that they encounter during their daily conversations with English native speakers; and the communications strategies (CSs) they use to overcome these difficulties. Likewise, twenty English native speakers were also interviewed to report their communication difficulties they encounter and the strategies they adopt during their informal conversations with Sudanese participants as EFL speakers.
The results indicate that the common oral communication difficulties reported by the Sudanese participants are limited vocabulary size, technical vocabulary, phrasal vocabulary, phonological variation of accent, regional dialects variations and perceived speech rate. Upon encountering these problems, the Sudanese learners reported that they employ communication strategies like appeal for assistance, asking for repetition, clarification request, asking for lengthening of words, body language, circumlocution, message abandonment, appeal for literal translation, preparatory strategies and guessing.
On the other hand, English native speakers reported that they encounter communication difficulties such as suprasegmental features, inappropriate vocabulary use, cross-cultural variations, etc. As a result, they reported that they employ various strategies to overcome communication problems with Sudanese interlocutors such as appeal for assistance, asking for repetition, body language, clarification request, circumlocution, guessing, message abandonment, appeal for paraphrasing in standard English, asking for confirmation and longer-term developing communication strategy.
Secondly, investigating the communication difficulties and strategies in the first study led to the emergence of specific themes such as the Sudanese learners’ inability to use vocabulary within the appropriate context. Accordingly, this led to some new focused questions used to examine the Sudanese learners’ pragmatic competence, that is to test their ability to use language forms to realise different communicative situations with different functions. In addition, these questions were used to examine their knowledge of appropriate use of the linguistic forms in certain social contexts.
In this study, twenty Sudanese learners were individually asked to complete twelve Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) scenarios with variety of functions; and then their responses to these scenarios were double rated by eight English native speakers to find out whether they were acceptable or unacceptable, their justifications for these ratings and what communication difficulties they highlighted.
The results indicate that the pragmatic competence of the Sudanese learners is satisfactory when realising DCT situations. However, English native speakers highlighted various communication difficulties such as insufficient explanation, irrelevant response to the given situation, inappropriate explanation, absence of explanation, incomprehensive response, inconsistent content, irrelevant response to context, inappropriate lexical use and unfamiliar pronunciation.
Finally, the study considers the pedagogical implications of the findings for teaching and learning the second language, and syllabus design research and for non-native speakers everywhere. This may provide such learners with better opportunity to develop communication strategies practice and raise their socio-pragmatic awareness.
