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

and adjusting meanings, five of them were adopted as the research targets in this
study. The three reduction strategies were topic avoidance, message abandonment,
and meaning replacement strategies in the reduction set. The two achievement
strategies were interlanguage-based, and cooperation strategies. This study provided
explanations of the schemes within the five strategies.
First of all, in an article written by Tarone, Cohen, and Dumas for Faerch and
Kasper’s Strategies in Interlanguage Communication, “topic avoidance” was
described as: “the attempt to totally evade communication about topics which require
the use of target language rules or forms which the learner does not yet know very
well” (Tarone, Cohen & Dumas, 1983, p. 10). Their statement recommends the
speakers should move away from an interaction in which they had very little
comprehension about the topics. That is, for achieving a purpose of effective
communication, students needed to focus on a subject matter in which interlocutors
were interested in and well acquainted in order to reduce the lexical or knowledge
difficulties in communication.
In the reduction set, the second strategy, message abandonment strategy was
explained by Tarone (1983), “The learners begin to talk about a concept but are
unable to continue and stop in mid-utterance” (p. 63). In fact, this strategy advised
that the learners should abandon their attempt to convey an intended expression if
they judged that the intended meaning finally could not be expressed within their
limited linguistic competence.
Additionally, the last strategy in the reduction set, the meaning replacement
strategy, also could be termed as “semantic avoidance strategy” (Faerch & Kasper,
1983c, p. 44), which indicated that the learners should alter a difficult intended
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