AN ANALYISIS OF COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES USED BY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS OF FKIP LAMPUNG UNIVERSITY

Abstract

Basically, this research is aimed at investigating the use communication strategies done by the students at the English Department of FKIP UNILA in their attempt to overcome problem in getting a lexical meaning across in English. This include the description of (1) types of strategies used, (2) effectiveness rate, (3) characteristics of their use, (4) their frequency of occurrences, and (5) reasons for their use. The results indicate that the communication strategies used previously and the effectiveness rate were as follows: topic avoidance (2.14%), appeal for assistance (33.33%), literal translation (33.33%), message abandonment (54.56%), circumlocution (65.07%), approximation (66.67%), language switch (71.43%), word-coinage (75.00%). The characteristics are risk taking, risk avoiding, L2-based, non-linguistic based, repetition, and reconstruction of the utterance. Furthermore, the reasons of using the strategies are naturally motivated by the efforts to avoid communication breakdowns. Ultimately, they can be categorized into: linguistics and psychological limitations.

Key words: communication strategy, use, negotiation of meaning