The study sees communication strategies (CSs) not as just compensatory expressions but as English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' interlanguages (ILs), and looks at CSs as a mirror of a dynamic second language acquisition (SLA) process. The study compares EFL learners' CSs with those evident among native speakers of English (NSE). By using CS material,1 EFL learners' ILs develop from avoidance or hesitant unstable utterances to more structurally stable ones which bear remarkable similarity in their linguistic construction to those of NSE. This fact sheds new light on the controversy over the teachability of CSs.

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