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

second or foreign language, through storage, retention, recall, and application of
information about the language” (p. 4).
As has been noted, most researchers of the communication strategy field
argued the processes of strategy application either were conscious or sub-conscious.
The researcher of this study in Taiwanese university hold that during the training
process of communication strategy, the language learners should have their
consciousness and plan in mind, when learning and practicing using communication
strategies. However, after they (Taiwanese language learners) were accustomed to the
skills and usages in the communication strategies, the concepts and mechanisms of
the communication strategies might have been outright absorbed, so language
learners would reflect which communication strategy to use without considering for a
long while as before. The reason was that the language learners automatically might
articulate their fossilized language of the particular structures of communication
strategies through their sub-consciousness.
Earlier Studies
In the earlier stage of communication strategy studies, several significant
empirical studies were conducted in the 1980s. These empirical studies were reported
by Bialystok (1983), Tarone (1983), Faerch and Kasper (1984), Paribakht (1985),
Poulisse (1987), and Corrales (1989).
In 1983, Bialystok conducted two empirical studies. In the first study, she
discovered that those subjects who had traveled widely and spoke more than two
foreign languages proved to be superior in their second language strategy use. In her
second study, she focused on the issue of age and compared the adults’ and children’s
application of communication strategies. Her findings displayed that the adult
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