Second Language Writing: Communication Strategies in Narrative and Descriptive Texts

This dissertation was generated by the lexical problems observed in foreign language learners at the moment of expressing their meanings when writing across two genres:narrations and descriptions. The learners whose written production was investigated belong to the 1st Year at the English Training College at Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto (Córdoba), Argentina. Due to their limited command of the target language -English-, as well as to the marked interference of their mother tongue -Spanish-, an important part of their written output turned out weak,inaccurate and many a time, meaningless. However, communication strategies applied by some of these learners proved to help them out of lexical drawbacks, thus enabling them to express their intended meanings as well as to comply with the two required genres. Interesting results show that EFL learners' strategic competence should be developed for them to overcome lexico-grammatical difficulties.-