Communication Strategies that can be used when you get stuck in speaking

Have you ever gotten stuck in a foreign language conversation, not being able to understand what the other person is saying, or not being able to express what you want to express? Did you stay stuck for an uncomfortable amount of time, or were you able to solve the problem and move on in a comfortable way? How many "strategies" for getting unstuck can you think of?

Canale and Swain (1980) include "strategic competence" as one of the four main components of communicative competence along with linguistic (accurate expressions for what you want to say), socialinguistic (appropriately polite choice of verbal and non-verbal language), and discourse competence (making a smooth transition from idea to idea so that you don't lose your partner). Strategic competence is defined by Canale and Swain (1980) as "strategies that speakers employ to handle breakdowns in communication. (p.25)" In other word, it is the ability to "keep going" with your communication in spite of difficulties with understanding or expressing ideas in the foreign language." Judging from my experience with professionals and college students in Tokyo, I feel that strategic competence is one of the areas in which Japanese speakers of English need more explicit practice.

I had read about strategic competence before and had seen taxonomies of strategies such as the one below adapted from Yoshida-Morise's article in Young and He's Talking and Testing (2001), but had never worked through them with a view to introducing them systematically to language learners. I'm considering some kind of introduction in my speaking class next term, but will knowing these be useful somehow? Also, how do I make this list into a usable resource for learners to draw on when they get stuck. What learners are interested in, unlike researchers, is what strategies they SHOULD use, not what they DO use.

Reduction Strategies (abandoning or reducing the meaning)
-Topic avoidance (staying silent or changing the topic)
-Message abandonment (giving up trying to say that idea)
-Semantic avoidance (changing the message to a simpler one)

Achievement Stragies (filling in the gaps of IL to achieve communication of the meaning)
1.Approximation (using a similar meaning when you don't know the right phrase)
--Lexical substitution (similar word)
--Generalization (more general word)
--Exemplification (listing examples to let the listener guess)
2. Paraphrase (saying the meaning in different words)
--Circumlocution (like playing Taboo)
--Word Coinage (two sleep days)
--Morphological creativity (internationalizated)
3. Restructuring - Changing to a different sentence structure
4. Borrowing from their L1, which is usually not effective
5. Cooperative Strategies - Asking the interlocutor for help
-Indicate they cannot explain "It is very hard for me to express."
-Ask how to say something "What do you call the..."
6. Non-linguistic gestures, mimes, pictures, sound imitations
7. Repair - saying it, then fixing it and saying it better
8. Telegraphic strategies--communicating without saying anything, just a pause
9. Fillers (in L1 or L2) nanteyuuka How do I say it?
10. Change of role (Asking a question instead of answering it)

So...all of these are good, of course, in the sense that learners have to do what they have to do to survice with limited language resources. There is nothing wrong with abandoning something that is not working as a message in communication.

Next, the most useful of these, as "good" strategies to teach seem to be:
1) Giving examples
2) Circumlocution
3) Non-linguistic circumlocution (?) - mimes, drawing etc.
4) Asking for help
5) In any case, not giving up on the conversation or going quiet. Continuing to find a way to go forward with the communication (assuming that is the best thing to do, of course)

Question:
What would a conversation between native speakers of English show? What kind of strategies for communication are used among advanced speakers to make the conversation go smoothly? Less proficient speakers definitely should learn from those.
Can a database of academic spoken language shed light on that?
http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/ESL/FormulaicExpression/Definition.htm
http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/ESL/Clarifying/Intro.htm
http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/index.htm

What would a corpus of academic spoken discourse look like at ICU? What kind of speak acts will students actually need to perform? Also, in business or other professional arenas beyond ICU, what will be required of many of our students? (Is it even realistic to try to guess that?) How do we lay a foundation that will maximally applicable to the maximum number of students?