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

partner’s utterances, ignore the comments, control the topic, and make more
declaration of fact or opinion. Similarly, Siennicki (2000) asserted that men tended to
reveal their emotion less, but tended to have more control during interactions.
In agreement with the above two studies related to gender differences in
communication, Jiun Sheng revealed his need to keep his male characteristics in
communication. This face-saving problem might be less apparent for people from the
West because “research indicates that in the West, at least, differences in
communication style often correlate less with gender than with factors such as a role
and status” (Wetzel, 1988, p. 560). To diagnose Ling Mei’s case, her face-saving
problem could be caused by the “affective filter” among four factors of Krashen’s
(1988) language acquisition theory. The researcher believes that Ling Mei’s stressful
status that influenced her learning should be resolved by a calming environment of
the in-class communication or an established confident attitude of learning.
Affective Filter
Based on Sung Ru’s and Jiun Sheng’s feedback, the message abandonment
strategy provided a function for reducing students’ anxiety in communication. For
example, in the first finding, Sung Ru pointed out that she was free when abandoning
a message. Also, she did not have to worry whether a word she explained to her
classmates was easy for them. That is, she did not have to worry about the
face-saving problem because she just could abandon it and continue to talk.
Similarly, Jiun Sheng perceived his struggling status of deciding if he would
be able to resort to the other strategy could be released immediately after he decided
to use the message abandonment strategy. Jiun Sheng was free after using it.
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The above two cases indicated that the message abandonment strategy