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

Faerch and Kasper’s (1983a) classification, which divided the communication
strategies into two sets of “reduction strategies” and “achievement strategies” (p. 38).
In fact, the titles of “reduction" and “achievement" that Faerch and Kasper
created clearly explained the functions of two types of the communication strategies.
Literally, the “reduction” meant that the strategies might reduce the meaning of the
intended expressions. Contrastingly, the “achievement” meant that the strategies
would help these speakers to establish and complete their intended meanings with
particular skills.
The real history of communication strategies started in the early 1980s when
Canale and Swain (1980) included them in what Hymes (1972) termed
“communicative competence” as their influential model of communicative
competence. Canale and Swain (1980) regarded the communication strategies as the
primary constituents in strategic competence, which was defined as one of four
communicative competences in their model of communicative competence. Actually,
they emphasized that the strategic competence should be as significant as the other
three dimensions of communication competence, grammatical competence,
sociolinguistic competence, and discourse competence.
Soon after Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983) identified strategic
competence as one of the four significant dimensions in communicative competence,
Faerch and Kasper (1983c) published a complete volume, Strategies in Interlanguage
Communication, in order to define subjectively and classify communication
strategies. This book included the most important published papers and research at
that time (Bialystok, 1983; Blum-Kulka & Levenson, 1983; Corder, 1983; Dechert,
1983; Faerch & Kasper, 1983a; Haastrup & Phillipson, 1983; Raupach, 1983; Tarone,
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