Strategies in English Oral Communication Employed by Thai Engineering Students across Majors and Types of Academic Programs
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Abstract
English communication strategies refer to any systematic techniques or learning behaviors which learners use to cope with difficulties in oral communication and each learner has his or her own way for communicating. The present study was aimed at investigating English communication strategies employed by Thai engineering students in relation to different majors in the same engineering field and different types of academic programs. The samples consisted of 189 first-year students including 57 civil engineering students, 62 mechanical engineering students, and 70 electrical engineering students, which were selected by using the table of Krejcie and Morgan (1970), stratified random sampling and simple random sampling method. The communication strategy questionnaire which was adapted from the Oral Communication Strategy Inventory (Nakatani, 2006) was administered to the samples. The data were analyzed through the SPSS statistical package in accordance with frequency, means, standard deviation, One-way ANOVA, and an Independent T-test. The findings of this study showed that overall of the communication strategies used by Thai engineering students are rated at the moderate level. Evidently, among the strategies employed by Thai engineering students, the nonverbal strategy was considered to be the most frequently used while the accuracy-oriented strategy was the least often used. Focusing on majors, the three groups of students in engineering filed showed no significant differences regarding the used strategies. However, in the aspect of types of academic programs, significant differences between students in general and transfer programs were found in two strategies, namely social affective strategies and fluency-oriented strategies.
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