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

In 1972, Selinker and Savignon reported on a pioneering language teaching
experiment involving a communicative training approach, which, for the first time,
included students’ training process in communication strategies. Then, Varadi (1973)
and Tarone (1979) were two scholars who elaborated Selinker’s notions and provided
a systematic analysis of communication strategies in the 1970s. They developed and
introduced their taxonomies and terms, which were used in the subsequent
communication strategy studies.
The earliest examples of strategies were provided by Tarone in 1978, which
helped the researchers and the second language learners “arrive at both a clarification
and a definition of the notion communication strategy” (p. 286). Her examples were
offered with the existent categorization at that time, which were paraphrase
(approximation, word coinage, and circumlocution), borrowing (literal translation
and language switch), appeal for assistance, mime, and avoidance (topic avoidance
and message abandonment) communication strategies (Tarone, 1978).
Tarone’s (1978) examples were as follows: (1) “pipe for water pipe”
(approximation), (2) “airball for balloon” (word coinage), (3) “She is, uh, smoking
something. I don’t know what’s its name. That’s uh, Persian, and we use Turkey, a lot
of.” (circumlocution), (4) “He invites him to drink, for they toast one another.”
(literal translation), (5) “tritil for caterpillar” (language switch), (6) “What is this?
What called? (appeal for assistance), (7) “Not to talk about concepts for which the
Target Language (TL) item or structure is not known.” (topic avoidance), (8) “Talk
about a concept but is unable to continue and stops in mid-utterance.” (avoidance)
(Tarone, 1981, pp. 286- 287). Later, Paribakht (1985) also displayed 46 examples of
speech production created through communication strategies categorized by
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