The Author, Dr Mensimah Kwaffo, is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Law, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Ashesi University. Her research interests encompass Foreign Language Education, Teaching French as a Foreign Language, Teaching with Technology, and Sociolinguistics.
At 14, I attended an international youth summer camp in Ghana that brought together young people across Africa. That year, many attendees came from neighboring Francophone countries. While Ghanaians are known for their warmth, many of us struggled to interact with them; language quickly became a barrier. With my basic French, I could connect, offer help, and form friendships. That experience reshaped how I saw the language, not just as a subject, but as a means to foster deeper human connections and embrace cultural inclusivity.
In Ghana, French is taught as a core subject in primary and middle school, making it a compulsory part of the national curriculum. Every Ghanaian child with access to formal education will have the opportunity to study French at some point in their academic journey. Yet, despite this widespread instruction, many struggle to hold even a basic conversation in the language.
Given Ghana’s proximity to several Francophone countries and growing efforts to promote regional integration, oral proficiency in French remains a significant challenge for many students. Ghana’s full membership in the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) reflects the language’s rising importance, yet speaking it confidently is still daunting. The reasons are layered: inadequate teaching materials, limited emphasis on spoken language, anxiety-inducing learning environments, and a curriculum overly focused on literary and written French.
Navigating Speaking Challenges Through Communication Strategies: What Research Reveals.
These challenges prompted my doctoral research on how learners navigate speaking challenges in foreign languages, not through perfect grammar or flawless fluency, but through communication strategies (CS). Through these deliberate strategies or intuitive techniques, such as linguistic and non-linguistic fillers, pauses, circumlocution, and rephrasing, students can maintain conversation even when vocabulary fails them.
Drawing on Levelt’s Lexical Access Theory and its adaptation by Segalowitz (2010), this study explored the cognitive demands learners face during real-time speech production in a foreign language. Intermittent pauses, for example, representing moments of strategic reflection, offer students precious seconds to retrieve the right words during speech production. Through questionnaires, task-based analyses, and retrospective interviews, it was discovered that learners who use communication strategies communicate and rely on their creative abilities and proactivity to solve linguistic obstacles in real time. These strategies help build confidence, maintain fluency, and foster linguistic perseverance in challenging environments.
