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

systems.” (p. 422). Hence, the trainer regards students’ English with characteristics of
Mandarin or Taiwanese to be acceptable.
Students expressed their ability of linguistics analysis for Chinese characters
influenced a lot to their speech when using interlanguage strategy. The respondents
indicated that their ability to use interlanguage strategy was associated with their
proficiencies of Mandarin and Taiwanese. In fact, their perceptions also were
mentioned by Bialystok’s description of communication strategy. Bialystok (1983),
in one of her studies for communication strategies, consistently pointed out that “The
communication strategies are revealed through linguistic analyses of the learner’s
interlanguage. These strategies indicate the extent to which the learner’s utterances in
the target language are affected by the native language” (p. 101). Bialystok implied
English learners’ ability to use interlanguage to communicate is in an equal rank with
the English learners’ native language proficiency. As can be seen, participants’
perceptions reflected in the previous studies, which emphasized the close relationship
between the application of interlanguage and the proficiency of the speakers’ native
language (Bialystok, 1983; Selinker, 1972).
Face-Saving
In the field of communication strategies, the face-saving issue has been
studied (Faerch & Kasper, 1984). In a significant study in the field of communication
strategy, by Faerch and Kasper (1984), they revealed that advanced learners were
more likely to experience face-saving problems when they were using interlanguage
strategies to communicate. They emphasized that, when the advanced learners’
communication was activated because of their increased interlanguage proficiency,
the face problem started to emerge. Faerch and Kasper (1984) mentioned: “because
183