A Dissertation by GRACE HUI-CHIN LIN Submitted to the Office of ...

Research Question Three
What Do Taiwanese University Students Perceive in Learning the Meaning
Replacement Strategy?
In both sets of interviews, students enunciated their experiences of learning
how to find an appropriate word to replace a difficult word, which also led to the
findings for the third strategy, meaning replacement. It was concluded by four among
the seven students that it was a valuable and supportive strategy. Cheng Chih, Tien
Long, Ling Mei, and Pei Pei believed this strategy to be helpful in obtaining high
English proficiency. In addition, they pointed out that this strategy should be applied
in order to make listeners capture the meanings more effectively. Three respondents,
Sung Ru, Jian Guo, and Jiun Sheng also talked about how they perceived in learning
this strategy, but they did not state a positive or negative attitude toward it.
Cheng Chih Chen
Cheng Chih agreed that replacement strategy was an applicable strategy from
his first interview. He stated that he had learned this strategy since he was a high
school student. Also, he emphasized that it was a strategy that assisted him to survive
overseas. Cheng Chih talked about his perceptions and offered several examples. In
Cheng Chih’s first interview, he talked about how he had learned this strategy, and
what types of words caused his linguistics limitation:
I had learned to use simpler words to communicate in order to make the
communication sound more continuous and silver-tongued. My English
teacher taught me that comprehensibility was much more important than
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tough vocabulary in communication. Hence, I tried not to make mistakes and