Within language, discourse, and communication-strategy research, an interaction strategy is a purposeful verbal, nonverbal, or discourse-organizational action through which interlocutors jointly manage the progress and mutual intelligibility of a communicative exchange. It encompasses moves that initiate, maintain, negotiate, redirect, clarify, confirm, repair, or close interaction, particularly when participants encounter uncertainty, incomplete understanding, or limitations in linguistic resources ^[1][2].

Its defining feature is its interactional orientation: rather than being directed solely at an individual speaker’s formulation of an utterance, an interaction strategy is responsive to the other participant’s contributions and seeks to coordinate shared meaning and conversational activity. Such strategies may involve explicit negotiation of meaning, including clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks, repetitions, and self- or other-initiated repair ^[1][3]. Interaction strategies are therefore distinguished from purely achievement-oriented or avoidance-based communication strategies, which may be performed by an individual without necessarily eliciting or incorporating interlocutor feedback. They constitute a relational component of communicative competence because their operation depends on turn-taking, contextual interpretation, and the reciprocal adjustment of discourse by participants ^[2][3].