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

English speakers using communication strategies were at “the presence of
consciousness depending on individual and situation variables as well as on the
linguistic material and the psychological procedures” (p. 47). From this perspective,
using communication strategies should be a conscious behavior because they claimed
“that plans criteria of ‘problem-orientedness’ and ‘consciousness’ are relevant criteria
as seen from the perspective of Foreign Language (FL) learning and teaching” (p. 2).
Kumaravadivelu (1989) in an article, Communication Strategies and
Psychological Processes Underlying Lexical Simplification, asserted three
psychological processes of producing language through communication strategies,
which the language learners would go through when they encountered linguistic
difficulties. According to Kumaravadivelu (1989), these three processes were a
process of overgeneralization, a process of creative transfer, and a process of cultural
relativity. That is to say, in these three processes, the learners would appear to access
simpler speech productions, to effect required morphological and syntactic
transformations, and to operate in the mode and sequence of thought patterns
characteristic of their native culture. Kumaravadivelu (1989) did not clearly claim
whether the users of communication strategies applied the strategies with their
consciousness in mind; however, the three mental processes he recognized implied
that the strategy users should have experienced their consideration state as well as a
conscious status before they produced their speeches successfully.
Bialystok (1990) declared that the issue of consciousness in strategy
application was a significant research question: “it remains an empirical question to
determine the extent to which learners are even aware of the set of strategic options
and the choices they make” (p. 48). In the book, Communication Strategies, A
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