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

Dornyei and Scott’s (1997) definition of communication strategy was that it
was a method of problem-management in second language communication that
helped non-native speakers arrange difficult meanings. They considered the
communication strategies as problem solving techniques that coped with the
language related problems of which the speakers were aware during the course of
communication (Dornyei & Scott, 1997).
Rababah (2002c) classified the communication strategies from the view of the
speakers’ first and second language. With the similar communication strategies
introduced by the other scholars, Rababah (2002c) categorized 16 strategies into first
language and second language based strategies, which became a newer taxonomy (pp.
24-27). He defined communication strategies as “ways second language learners use
to solve their communication problems due to their limited linguistic resource”
(Rababah, 2002c). Actually, the existing definitions of communication strategies
provided chiefly tend to illustrate that the communication strategies are for resolving
problems caused by non-native speakers’ linguistic resource limitation.
Psychological Status of Strategy Application
Scholars in the field of communication strategies tended to discuss a question:
Do speakers use communication strategies consciously or not? In the history of
communication strategy field, Bialystok (1990), Cohen (1998), Dornyei and Scott
(1997), Faerch and Kasper (1983c, 1984), Gass and Selinker (1994),
Kumaravadivelu (1989), Selinker (1972), and Weimann and Daly (1994) had studied
for this controversy and offered their different aspects upon this issue.
Before the theory of communication strategies had been developed fully, the
pioneer of this field, Selinker (1972) discussed psychological structures in the second
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