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

Jiun Sheng Chang
Jiun Sheng revealed that he had learned how to deal with tough topics by
directly showing his difficulty in topics he had not mastered. On the other hand, he
opposed “keeping silence.” In his first interview, Jiun Sheng considered that learning
topic avoidance was necessary:
Before I learned topic avoidance, I usually pretended that I understood what
the interaction was about. After I was taught the “topic avoidance” strategy, I
learned to tell my partners directly and honestly that I didn’t understand much
about this subject matter.
Jiun Sheng, in his second interview, said he identified changing topics to be
necessary, but he had to change the topic in a proper way. He provided a successful
example how he had changed the focus:
Once in class, my classmate told me an insect bit her, which was about a topic
I was not interested in. However, I did not change it immediately. I did not
think that changing a boring topic too quickly was a friendly thing to do. So I
responded to her with a similar topic related to insects. I told her my own
story about how I wanted to seize a Japanese beetle. Finally, the topic about
the insect had been changed into another whole new one not long after I told
her my story. It seemed she realized that my similar story was merely a polite
response to her boring topic.
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