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

Themes Emerged from Students’ Perceptions about the Message Abandonment
Strategy
This study suggested that the issue of “time-saving” was associated with
students’ decision to use the message abandonment strategy in communication. Also,
it revealed that the message abandonment strategy might offer a function of saving
face.
First of all, Sung Ru’s feedback actually suggested that when the discussion
time is longer, the message abandonment strategy would be used less frequently by
the students. In contrast, if the students were allowed to speak in a formal way for a
longer time, the other strategies, such as the restructuring strategy, interlanguage
strategy, or cooperation strategy should be applied so the message abandonment
would not be as useful.
Also, Jiun Sheng observed that when the in-class group discussion time
assigned by the lecturer was not long enough, many students frequently abandoned
messages that were not understood by their partners. Interestingly, Jiun Sheng
observed a systematic relation between the use of abandonment strategy and time
limitations in class discussions. Jiun Sheng perceived that, when the class discussion
time allowed by the trainer was not long enough, his classmates would resort to
abandonment strategy more often and not try to explain or describe the high-level
lexis. Because the students did not have enough time to contemplate how to express
themselves, they chose to omit the message they thought would be too
time-consuming.
Furthermore, the second major theme for the second research question was
that using the message abandonment strategy might save face for lower-level
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