Abstract:
Communication strategies become beneficial in overcoming the
communication gaps. This research focuses on the study of commmunication
strategies used by the fourth-semester students of English Department in
Discussion and Debate Class at Muhammadiyah University of Purworejo in
academic year of 2012/2013 which aims to investigate the types of
communication strategies and to find the most dominant type of communication
stratrgies used.
Qualitative method is used to conduct this research. The subject of this
research is the fourth-semester students of English Department at Muhammadiyah
University of Purworejo. The data was collected by recording students’ speech
which is analyzed to describe and to explain in detail phenomenon of
commmunication strategies used in the real situation.
The result of this study showed that students performed the various types
of communication strategis. This research conducts the typology of
communication strategies proposed by Faucette (2001). There are eleven types of
communication strategies performed by students: approximation (9.01%),
circumlocution (3.60%), borrowing (11.71%), foreignizing (1.80%), word coinage
(16.22%), topic avoidance (5,.41%), message replacement (6.31%), abandonment
(10.81%), appealing for assistance (8.11%), non-verbal (5.41%), and time-stalling
devices (21.62%). The researcher found that time-stalling devices became the
most dominant strategy used. The researcher expects that the other researchers
will be interested in conducting researches about communication strategies
because it is so close to the learners’ interlanguage in acquiring L2. It is also
possible to other researchers to conduct the same research in the different sources
of data.
