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

meaning beyond doubt. I preferred to draw on these 2 strategies agilely.
Ling Mei said that another advantage of the meaning replacement strategy was to
guess what others were talking about:
Besides the purpose for expressing my intended meaning, I also used
meaning replacement strategy to guess the others’ intended meaning. When
my partners wanted to say a word which was too difficult for her/him to say
and for me to comprehend, I would, according to my own comprehension, use
a replaced word in order to ask her/him whether the word I expressed was
what s/he wanted to say.
Thinking of a simple word and reconfirming the meaning with the speaker
during conversation was one of the ways I applied replacement strategy. I
guessed the others’ intended meaning, and offered a vague concept for them. I
reconfirmed if that was the word they would like to convey. If I did it
successfully or the vague word I provided was the right word, it saved much
time for both sides because we did not have to linger around a difficult word
for a long time.
After the second interview, Ling Mei further explained why the meaning replacement
strategy was applied in the university where students’ English should be good enough
and do not need to use it. Ling Mei reflected her opinion through the international
phone call:
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