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

type of vegetable,” (generalization) and “It is red which rabbit likes”
(exemplification). Another example, the student had the word “Hammer,” and
signals his classmate the word was a kind of “Tool for knocking nail”
(generalization).
Ling Mei perceived that “paraphrase” can be used under a situation where she would
like to help the others in understanding a difficult meaning:
I believed that after my English becomes better; I would rather not use “word
coinage” and “generalization.” The usage of “paraphrase” still should be
available when I am more proficient in English, because I would use this
strategy to explain to the others when telling them a high-level word they
haven’t learned yet. I believed that native speakers also used a lot of
“paraphrase” strategy in speaking, not because their English was not superior,
but because they needed to explain for non-native speakers some words they
could not comprehend.
Ling Mei’s perceptions toward “restructuring” and topic avoidance were similar. She
felt that both of them interrupted a communication:
As to the restructuring strategy, it made the conversation inarticulate and not
fluent. “Restructuring” was like “keeping silence” in topic avoidance strategy
because both of them made the whole communication pause in the middle
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and might confuse our interlocutor suddenly. Both of these two strategies did