A Study on Communication Breakdowns between Native and Non-native Speakers in English Speaking Classes

English majored students have a positive influence on intercultural awareness in learning a foreign language. In their classes, they are often asked to discuss some academic matters in British cultural beliefs. Although they have a high level of proficiency in English communication, there often encountered misunderstandings between them when they interpret things or present academic matters. As a result, students cannot achieve plurilingual and pluricultural competence in the course. This paper was conducted to investigate communication problems between Vietnamese learners of English and Native teachers at HUFI. The data were collected from 28 participants who are third-year students and four different lecturers from different countries. The findings revealed that sources were mainly clustered for the following reasons: perceptual and language differences, information overload, inattention time pressures, distraction/noise emotions, complexity in organizational structure, and poor retention. The perceptual and language differences, information overload, and emotions were mainly responsible for the quality of communication. This paper can help students engage in awareness-raising activities that promote understanding in some contacts and discussions.


Types of Communication strategies (CSs)
have proposed 28 communication strategies used by Vietnamese learners in communication with NL speakers (see Table 1). These strategies were integrated from many types of research on the field of CSs : verbal interaction (Tarone, 1980;Faerch & Kasper, 1980), and the cognitive process of selecting CSs (Bialystok, 1983;Kellerman, 1995;Poulisse, 1997). ( In this study, we based on the strategies in Table 1 for analyzing the data but also shortened the list to four main types which are avoiding (involving topic and Message abandonment), paraphrasing (involving Approximation, Circumlocution, Word Coinage), borrowing (involving Literal Translation, Language mixing/switching), appeal for assistance, and mime.

Methodology
The material was part of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry Videos and Voice repository (HUFI-VVR), which were recorded and stored by foreign language teachers, containing transcripts naturally occurring in persons between Vietnamese and English learners native language (NL) teachers. For this study, we selected all instances of conversations that have contained a silences mode for than 3s in their conversations to analyze them by using sound waveform. The reduced corpus comprised 11 conversations containing 18,407 words. The total participants in the conversations were 28 third-year students and four NL teachers. The NL teachers come from different English -speaking countries: America (1), Australia (1), and England (2). Their ages varied from 25 to 60. The data were processed with the help of Sketch Word Engine, a tool to analyze how the language works, at the address: https://www.sketchengine.eu/ The collected databases were first explored in search of reasons and types of communication breakdowns between Vietnamese students of English major and NL lecturers. The dataset was analyzed in details to identify what caused the failures and what strategies were used to resolve them. Similar types of causes and strategies were then grouped together to a larger term based on their linguistic characteristics.

Communication breakdowns sources
The data consisted of 11 instances of CBs s and conversations were resolved immediately with the help of Vietnamese teachers or students' gestures or changing the topics of conversations. Table 2 illustrates the summary of the reasons causing CBs in these instances of speech. The reasons might be subjective due to the responses from the NL lecturers who had taken part in these conversations. The three most common reasons for CBs are Perceptual and Language Differences with 21.43%, Information Overload and Emotions with the same rate at 17.86%. Although all students received the same messages from NL teachers, they interpret the messages in their own way. Their responses were not accepted in the interview with NL teachers in their speaking examination. For instance, when a student was asked, "How can we identify the value of one person?", and students might wrongly respond, "A person valued as/in….". or when the teacher asked questions that might include much information as a background for students' understanding and processing. When students had to answer such kinds of these questions, they could not recall and process the data given in the teacher's questions. Sometimes, when the teachers finished their speaking turns, the students were still waiting for something before they gave the answers. Additionally, emotion also contributed to the breakdowns of communications as NL teacher number 1 had commented: "Students are worried too much about the exam, they are easy to fall into silence even when the were asked a very simple question about the weather. When NL teachers were asked to give the details of CBs for each of the conversations: the possible causes are more than in Figure  1 because each conversation has more than reasons during the length of the speech.

Figure 1. Major causes of CBs
Although there were many causes of CBs as listed in Figure 1., the conversations were resolved by the teacher's turns immediately. Indicators such as Misinterpretation of the proper names (8) or Lack of shared cultural knowledge (12) meant they had problems with perception or concentration due to the difference in two languages and cultures Students also have many difficulties associated with English communication with native English speakers due to the communicative competence. They might not know the language rules and the ways to implement the language knowledge in a real situation for communications. Some of the CBs were completely complicated because they are intricately linked with each other among  Table 3 presents Cross-linguistic influence (CLI) on speaking. The collected data via the interview with NL speakers revealed that Vietnamese learners of English have all problems with CLI on their speaking abilities from all kinds of speech aspects as vowels, consonants, and stress with a relative rate of around 25 percent.

Strategies for reducing CBs between Native and Non-native English speakers
HUFI students used a large number of strategies to overcome the communication breakdowns with NL teachers. Table 4 illustrates the techniques used by themselves in their speaking lessons and examinations. According to the data from Table 4, the most common strategy employed by HUFI students was Paraphrasing with 50 percent of frequency and the least one was Mime with only 7.15 percent of usage. Many of them used L2 lexemes or structures that they might know incorrectly, but they sought the ones that shared some common semantics features with the words they wish to express, e.g., ' rose' for 'all kinds of the flowers they tended to use'. Twenty-five percent of NNL speakers in the survey have used Approximation strategy as their major strategy. Also, 14.29 percent of them employed their self-initiated repair as Circumlocution strategy in the following instance of speech to seek vocabularies and structures to develop their communications.
NNL speaker : What Is the biggest challenge you've faced in you study? Participant #8 : Challenge er er , …, I may …, oh ...find …er ..., some difficulties in er, …, er, some difficulties in my study… Nearly 11 percent of instances of speech were found with Coinage words such as 'airball' for 'balloon', baby-horse for 'foal',etc. This strategy had the same rate with Borrowing technique (10.71 %) in the form of mother tongue influence on the target language use. They sometimes use Vietnamese words for their unknown English words. Therefore, NL teachers have to stop the conversations for checking whether they were saying something correct or a misspelling. This finding was harmonized with the previous study of Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982) As stated by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982), borrowing (also called transfer) described as the use of past knowledge and past experience in a new situation. For example, one who had already known how to read in one language, she/he had not learned new words that written symbols represented sound when they were learning to read in a second language. This kind of transfer was reflected in the frequent use of the first language and the second language mixed expression. Borrowing strategy indicated that students lacked their vocabulary size requirement as C1-level of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages as described as their graduation learning goals. The other strategies were Avoiding, Appeal for assistance, and Mime with 17.86%, 14.28%, and 7.50%, respectively. These strategies were used when students did not talk about the concepts they had to talk about or talk about these concepts, but they could not continue smoothly.

Conclusion
This study was part of the interests in CBs explored in second language learning environments. This study contributed to a foreign language learning environment such as a Vietnamese context. The study on CBs has significance in improving students' speaking skills to prepare them for the future job markets. The key findings of the study were beneficial for language teachers and learners in their learning and teaching. First, the results have listed all of the CB sources. Language teachers may intervene in their material and teaching process to reduce the CBs for their students. Students, in turn, also know their weaknesses to equip themselves with some of the necessary knowledge to practice speaking skill with the highest performance and efficiency. Second, five common strategies were analyzed to see how students could use them to overcome their CBS . Basing on each strategy, language teachers can build up their lesson plans to strengthen students with an appropriate approach. This study might open up further research on CBs with communication concerns as a must-have soft skill for Higher Education curriculum design.
Funding: This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest:
The authors declare no conflict of interest.