LANGUAGE IN INDIA

MESSAGE TRANSMISSION AND COMPREHENSION OF
ARAB LEARNERS OF ENGLISH IN JORDAN
Ghaleb Ahmed Rabab'ah, Ph.D.

INTRODUCTION

This article reports an empirical research into the relationship between L2 learners' target language proficiency/task type and their ability to transmit comprehensible messages to their listeners. In order to test the assumption that even low-level English learners can transmit comprehensible messages despite their limited linguistic resources by using communication strategies (henceforth CSs), a sample of 30 Arab English majors at Yarmouk University in Jordan were asked to perform 3 CLT tasks: Picture story telling, Object-identification and Role-play.

The performance of the subjects was transcribed and analysed. The results indicate that transmission of comprehensible messages varies according to the learner's proficiency level and the task type. These findings lend further support to the hypothesis that even low level English proficiency learners can communicate and pass comprehensible messages to the interlocutor by resorting to communication strategies (CSs) despite their the linguistic errors committed.

THE REASON FOR THIS RESEARCH

Developing second language learners' communicative competence is the ultimate goal of foreign/second language teaching. One essential component of this competence is 'strategic competence'. According to Tarone and Yule (1989), there are two areas related to strategic competence: the learners' skill in transmitting messages to a listener or comprehending transmitted messages and their use of communication strategies to compensate for the linguistic problems that arise in the transmission process.

There has been extensive research into communication strategies, but the skill of the learner in transmitting and comprehending messages has received little attention. Tarone and Yule (1989: 103) maintain that "As far as we know, very little attempt has been made to investigate the first area, the learner's overall skills in strategic competence". The research that has been done in this area was carried out with native speakers. For example, Brown and Yule (1983) developed a task-based methodology to evaluate the communicative effectiveness of adolescent English native speakers. Some transactional tasks were developed, such as narrative, picture description and instructions, where the learners were asked to transmit information to a listener who needed the information to complete the task (e.g. Green, 1995) who investigated both areas of strategic competence). Thus, the aim of this experimental research is to find out the Arab English learners' ability to transmit comprehensible and successful messages through the use of communication strategies.

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

Why do people communicate? They communicate in order to pass certain messages to the listener. During the communication process, learners face linguistic problems, so they resort to CSs to solve them. Tarone and Yule (1989:107) state "in the interest of successful communication, learners seem to attempt to build in redundancy, to send a bigger signal, perhaps to ensure that the basic message does get across". In order to investigate communication success and the effectiveness of CSs in achieving the communicative goals of the learners, some researchers have set up a task for the learner in which the successful transmission of a message is 'criterial' (e.g., Bialystok and Frohlich, 1980, Chen, 1990 and Ellis 1984), but other researchers have not attempted to study whether or not the messages transmitted were successful (e.g., Khanji, 1996; Yarmohammadi and Seif, 1992; Poulisse and Schils, 1989). Ellis (1984) conducted a comparative study of L1 and L2 communicative performance where the learners were asked to tell a story depicted in pictures. According to Ellis:

In order to compare the two groups of avoidance and paraphrase strategies, a number of key 'information - bits' were identified by anticipating what information ought to be included in a notionally 'good' account of the story (1984:41).

Bialystok and Frohlich (1980) examined oral communication strategies for lexical difficulties. To elicit CSs, they used a reconstruction task and picture description task. They examined the communicative effectiveness of the CSs. In the first task, the subjects were asked to describe a picture in French, to a native speaker of French. The communicative effectiveness of the strategies used by the speaker was spontaneously assessed by the reconstructor (native speaker) who provided feedback by selecting either the correct item or an inappropriate object. The information given by each subject was given on separate cards to a native speaker whose job was to rank-order all the cards in terms of their effectiveness in conveying the meaning of a certain item. In the second task the subjects were asked to describe the picture in detail.

Chen's (1990) method for examining the effectiveness of the use of CSs to convey meaning was that each concept was evaluated by the native speaker during the interview and by an independent native speaker who listened to the tapes later. The subjects' communicative effectiveness was assessed by a native speaker according to the following scheme:

5	Effective - identified the words immediately
4	Quite effective - easy to identify the word
3	Moderately effective - hard to identify the word
2	Less effective - very hard to identify the word
1	Not effective - unable to identify the word

(Chen, 1990:161)

Green (1995) measured the learners' success in message transmission by anticipating the information bits that each task might produce. In order to assess the comprehensibility of the subjects' performance, 44 erroneous utterances were chosen from the production of a number of German pupils. 109 native speakers of English were asked to "judge whether the meaning of each item was "clear", "vague" or "distorted" (Green, 1995:109). Then the judgements were reduced to "clear" and "unclear".

Choosing only 44 erroneous utterances (Green, 1995) for analysis is not an ideal procedure to give us a clear picture of whether CSs are successful for transmitting a comprehensible message or not, because a certain utterance which includes a particular CS may be successful on one occasion by one particular learner, but may be unsuccessful on a number of occasions when used either by the same learner or by another learner.

OBJECTIVES AND METHODOLOGY

The major objective of this study is to answer the following questions:

1. Are the English majors at Yarmouk University successful in getting their message across to achieve their communicative goals by means of their use of communication strategies (CSs) and despite the linguistic errors committed?
2. Are advanced learners of English better at transmitting comprehensible messages?
3. Can low-level learners transmit comprehensible messages?
4. Does the task being performed have effect on message transmission and comprehension?

SAMPLING

For this purpose, a sample of 30 English majors (freshmen, sophomores, seniors and graduates) who were studying English at the Department of English at Yarmouk University. They all lived with their parents where the home language is Arabic. At the time of data collection, the subjects had been learning English as a foreign language for between 9 and 12 years. To make our classification of English majors reliable, an adapted TOEFL test of 60 items was used to identify the subjects' proficiency level (low, intermediate and advanced). Ten subjects were randomly selected to represent each proficiency level. The purpose of having three different levels in the sample was to enable us to examine the effect of proficiency on the learners' ability to transmit comprehensible messages.

According to the test results, the subjects were classified into three levels.

Table (1) Levels of English Language Proficiency

Test Score	0 - 20	21 - 40	41 - 60
Proficiency Level	Low	Intermediate	Advanced

TASKS

The following three tasks were given to the sample in order to answer the research questions posited earlier.

1. Object-identification/naming Task
   This task consisted of 15 pictures of different objects taken from everyday real life such as: escalator, lift, pushchair, broom, vacuum cleaner, etc. These objects were chosen because they represent real-life objects that learners encounter now and then in their houses, in streets, at shopping centres and at the university (Appendix IV). The subjects were asked to say what the objects were and if it was not possible to name the exact target items, they were asked to describe them in any way they liked to get their message across to the listener.
2. Picture Story-telling Task
   This task was a series of six pictures taken from Heaton (1966: 33-34) that tell the story of an accident (Appendix III). The learners were asked to tell the story, imagining that the researcher was their friend. The purpose of using pictures was to restrict the content of the learners' production without affecting the language used to tell the story. This task represents what we do in our daily life, since we generally tell our friends about what has happened to us or to others at work, while driving to work, etc.
3. Role-play Task
   A foreigner who has just arrived in London for the first time is having some problems he has to solve. He has met someone who has been in London for a long time and knows it very well. The foreigner wants to solve his problems with the help of the resident. The two speakers were guided with a chart that explained their roles (Appendix I). This task was taken from John Soars and Liz Soars (1996:5-6). The purpose of this task was to see how English majors perform language functions and how successful they are at passing and comprehending messages. The learners were given a chart that showed each partner the speech acts that he was supposed to perform. This was also done to control the content, not the language used. Learner A was given a chart to fill in the messages that received from his partner. The purpose was to measure message comprehension.

DATA COLLECTION PROCEDURE

The main data of this study were taken from cassette-recorded performances of the three tasks: Object-identification/naming task, Picture story-telling task and Role-play task in English L2 and Arabic L1. First, the subjects were asked to perform all the tasks in their native language/Arabic, and then in the target language. This was done to make the subjects feel more relaxed since it is very easy for anyone to perform such tasks in his/her first language. The subjects were audio-recorded in performing the three tasks in a private faculty office in the English Language Department. The procedure adopted in collecting the data for each task was as follows.

Object identification/naming Task

First, the subjects were asked to name the objects in their native language, Arabic. Then, they were asked to look at the photographs one by one and to make it clear in English which object they saw either by naming it, or in any other way, so that any one who would read their description later would be able to identify the objects or name them. During this task the subjects were not given any feedback or help in order to ensure that none of the subjects would be helped more than the other and that our interference would not influence the language produced. The subjects' oral production in both languages was audio-recorded and transcribed for the purpose of the analysis.

Picture Story-telling Task

This task was an oral narrative concerning an accident, in which the subjects were asked to assume the role of a witness telling the story to a friend who did not have any idea about the accident. The author was assumed to be their friend. The subjects' knowledge about the story was provided by a strip cartoon of six pictures taken from Heaton, 1966. See Appendix III. The steps followed were:

1. They were given three to four minutes to study the pictures and arrange their ideas.
2. The cassette recorder was switched on.
3. Then the subjects were asked to tell the story in English, but they were not given any help. They were asked to begin the story with " Yesterday . . . ."
4. Their oral production in both languages was audio-recorded and transcribed for analysis.
5. The researcher used key events so that they could be used as criteria against which we measured attempted and unattempted messages because each event is a message. See appendix V. Pictures were useful for the purpose of controlling the key events that we expected our subjects to produce. Besides, pictures are good for stimulating the subjects to produce language. Again, the researcher did not provide verbal feedback while the subjects were telling the story so as not to influence the language produced.

Role-play Task

The subjects were divided into pairs of the same proficiency level so that we could study the CSs used by both learners in asking and answering questions. They were asked to assume the roles of a stranger who has arrived in London and someone who lives in London and knows it very well. The subjects were given a chart that explained their roles. See appendix I. Roles were explained to the subjects once again to make sure that they understood the situation. The learner playing role A was given a chart to fill in the information that he got from his partner during the conversation. The pairs were given a few minutes to prepare themselves for the conversation. The cassette recorder was switched on. Finally, they were asked to play the roles in English and their oral production in L1 and L2 was recorded and transcribed for analysis.

Findings

The key words, key events and speech acts that were expected to be produced by the subjects were prepared in advance. They were examined by the researcher and two native speakers of English to decide how many key words, key events and speech acts were attempted by the subjects, and whether their transmitted messages were successful and comprehensible or not. If two of us agreed that an attempt was comprehensible, this attempt was considered successful.

1. Object-identification task

In the object-identification task, all pictures were attempted due to the nature of the task. All the picture descriptions were studied to decide whether they were comprehensible or not. The following table shows the results:

Table (2) Number of incomprehensible description instances

Picture No.	Low Level	Intermediate Level	Advanced Level
1	9	4	4
2	9	5	0
3	4	3	0
4	3	1	0
5	4	4	0
6	2	3	0
7	0	0	0
8	4	2	0
9	8	7	1
10	7	5	2
11	3	2	0
12	7	4	0
13	6	6	2
14	5	1	2
15	3	2	0
Total	75	47	11

The table shows that 75 attempts of the low-level learners' (of a total of 150 attempts) were incomprehensible and unsuccessful. In the cases of the intermediate learners, 47 attempts were incomprehensible. The advanced learners' descriptions were almost all comprehensible, apart from 11 attempts. The data also show that 10 pictures were attempted successfully by all the advanced learners and that their attempts were all comprehensible. All low level and intermediate learners attempted picture 7 successfully.

2. Story-telling task

The following tables show the distribution of unattempted key events in the story-telling task for the three proficiency levels.

No	Key event	Student Number										Total
		1	2	3	4	5	7	7	8	9	10
1	A boy was riding his bicycle.						Ö					1
2	A driver was driving very fast.		Ö									1
3	He honked the horn.	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	10
4	He knocked the boy off his bicycle.									Ö		1
5	The driver did not stop.			Ö		Ö		Ö				3
6	He set off on (went) on his journey.
7	The car broke down.	Ö										1
8	The boy rang the bell	Ö			Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö		Ö	6
9	He kept on without helping the car driver.
	Total	3	2	2	2	3	3	3	2	2	2	24

Table (3) Distribution of unattempted key events by low-level subjects

No	Key event	Student Number										Total
		1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	A boy was riding his bicycle.
2	A driver was driving very fast.										Ö	1
3	He honked the horn.	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö		Ö	Ö	Ö		Ö	8
4	He knocked the boy off his bicycle.									Ö		1
5	The driver did not stop.		Ö		Ö	Ö			Ö			4
7	He set off on (went) on his journey.
6	The car broke down.
8	The boy rang the bell	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	10
9	He kept on without helping the car driver.
	Total	2	3	2	3	3	2	2	3	1	3	24

Table (4) Distribution of unattempted key events by intermediate level subjects

No	Key event	Student Number										Total
		1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	A boy was riding his bicycle.