This study investigated patterns of communication breakdowns (CBs) and use of communication strategies (CSs) in the process of meaning negotiation between a native English speaking teacher and thirty five Korean EFL university students. For over a nine-week period, the classroom was observed and the data were collected through the transcriptions of tape recordings, teacher interviews, and student interviews. The results showed that patterns of CBs for EFL learners were multi-dimensional: syntactic, phonetic, lexical, and affective. Particularly in this class, whereas the teacher tried to choose the most effective and various strategies and tactics to ‘bridge the gap’ in communication, the student did not use CSs in a diverse manner in order to overcome CBs and only used eleven out of 33 CSs in the taxonomy of Dornyei and Scott (1997). Accordingly, it may be necessary for EFL learners to have more experiences in more contextualized classroom interaction or consciousness-raising activities for diverse use of CSs without sacrificing communicative opportunities to learn target language.