Research on communication strategies (CSs) has been drawing much attention in the area of psycholinguistics and applied linguistics. This study examined if triggering instruction can accelerate the cognitive aspects of CSs transference from L1 to L2. In the first part of the experiment, all participants, twenty-one Japanese university students, looked at pictures and were asked to say anything that came to their mind in English. In the second part, half of them (an experimental group) were instructed to begin the task by saying likes and dislikes of the picture. The other half (a control group) did not receive such an instruction. Participants also answered a questionnaire asking about self-evaluation of the task performance in order to examine their affective and cognitive state. Their utterances were classified as either objective descriptions of what was shown in the picture or subjective expressions of what they imagined or felt. The results of the experimental group clearly demonstrated the effect of instructional intervention; subjective expression increased and objective description decreased, and also their anxiety decreased from the first part of the experiment to the second. These findings suggest that more attention should be paid to the cognitive aspects of CSs such as change of viewpoint from objective to subjective, which we may call 'self-expression switching,' and its transference from L1.