THE USE OF COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGIES IN NARRATIVE DISCOURSE: A CASE STUDY OF A LEARNER OF MOROCCAN ARABIC AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Research in second language learners’communicative strategies has provided an elaborate framework for analyzing how learners manage to convey meanings and messages in spite of their limited "knowledge" of the target language. Many studies (e.g., Færch and Kasper 1983) have dealt with the identification and classification of communicative strategies (CSs). This paper investigates a new aspect of the use of CSs: the interaction between the application of CSs and narrative discourse features. Twelve narratives were collected from a learner of Moroccan Arabic as a second language over a four‐week period during daily conversation sessions in the target language. The analysis of the data draws upon research in narrative discourse (e.g., Labov 1972) and language learners’CSs (e.g., Tarone 1980; Færch and Kasper 1983). The study suggests that the subject resorted to a number of strategies to compensate for her linguistic deficiencies and that the application of these strategies was not random but constrained by narrative discourse features. The limitations of this study are discussed and suggestions for further research made.