Achieving CEFR Competency by Reducing Message Abandonment Among TESL Trainees in Sabah

Soft skills represent a very subjective business item that has been utilised as a strategic competence in the form of communication strategy. Communication strategies involve the vast range of linguistic and paralinguistic techniques such as the use of both achievement and reduction strategies. Despite being highly human based, the use of communication strategies needs to be learned and developed. Although one of the primary factors of communication strategy is the independence from linguistic rules, a rampant use of strategies such as topic fronting and message abandonment strategy among ESL learners might affect them adversely especially in academic discourse. This study looked into this strategy among the TESL trainees from Universiti Malaysia Sabah and how this affected their microteaching. It further analysed the relationship of the microteaching practice with the attainment of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) in rural classrooms taught by the TESL trainees during their practicum. This study used descriptive statistics analysis and a one-sample t-test to determine if TESL trainees’ microteaching performance has a statistically significant impact on their practicum performance. The t-value of 32.010 indicates that the sample mean (83.78) is significantly higher than the population mean (76.68). These results are validated with 5 themes obtained from an interview among 11 TESL trainees after the microteaching that revealed that they would use alternative communication strategies to replace message abandonment. This quantifies the improvement, showing that students who underwent microteaching performed significantly better during practicum observations.