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

communication strategies in the illustrating and interviewing processes for attaining a
high content validity. In other words, only five in nine strategies in Faerch and
Kasper’s taxonomy (1983c) were focused as the research targets when the
researchers trained and interviewed the participants.
Instruments of Training Materials
A notebook of sufficient discussion topics and a DVD containing illustrations
for techniques in the selected five communication strategies and examples of
dialogues, created for introducing this classification, had been provided to
participants before training. The training material containing explanations for the
usages in communication strategies and the examples of dialogues demonstrating the
skills in communication strategies both were designed according to Faerch and
Kasper’s (1983c) theory. The techniques in five communication strategies introduced
in the learning materials were explained from Faerch and Kasper’s (1983c)
achievement and reduction perspectives. The examples of dialogues in five
communication strategies had been adopted either from Faerch and Kasper’s (1983c)
article in their book, Strategies in Interlanguage Communication, or from journals of
communication strategy supporting Faerch and Kasper’s criterion (Ansarin & Syal,
2000; Bialystok, 1983, 1990; Chen, 1990; Corder, 1983; Corrales, 1989; Dornyei &
Scott, 1997; Kocoglu, 1997; Ogane, 1998; Rababah, 2002c; Yoshida-Morise, 1998).
The daily-life topics in the notebooks had been provided to the participants to
practice their skills in five communication strategies in class discussion activities.
They are topics from a website called Conversation questions for the ESL/EFL
classroom (1997-2005), which provide topics such as “charity,” “what if,” “love,
dating and marriage,” “crime,” and “health.” Using daily-life topics to interact was a
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