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

foreigners, they also should be able to comprehend the new word, but it
needed more time. I perceived that we should not use this strategy too
frequently because sometimes it might confuse your partners.
In the second interview, Ling Mei provided similar perceptions as in her first
interview. Ling Mei perceived the language created through the interlanguage
strategy would be more comprehensible by folks from the speakers’ cultural
backgrounds.
I believed interlanguage was very suitable for me to use when I talked to
people who had the same language background as mine. My classmate was
able to comprehend my language created through interlanguage strategies
because they understood the language structure in my mind, and they knew
how I created the words or sentences.
Differently, if I used the interlanguage to speak with foreigners who have
different language backgrounds from mine, they needed more time to realize
what I was talking about due to the diverse cognition. For example, my
Taiwanese classmates knew what “People Mountain People Sea 人山人海”
was without effort because it was translated from a Chinese idiom.
Dissimilarly, if I said the same sentence to the foreigners, they might think of
it for a second, and then they might be able to figure out.
Ling Mei offered an example of “word coinage” that she heard from her classmate:
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