Compensatory strategies used by English Teacher in SMP Internasional Laboratorium UM

ABSTRACT

Some people experience difficulties in expressing their ideas when they are communicating in English. To overcome the problems, people tend to use certain ways which are called as Compensatory Strategies to deliver their messages. This condition also happens to English teacher because the English teacher must speak English in delivering the materials. This research conducts the use of Compensatory Strategies in SMP InternasionalLaboratorium UM because English is mostly spoken in international standard school. The aims of this research are to describe the types as well as the function of Compensatory Strategies used by the English teacher.

This research uses descriptive qualitative design to get the information dealing with Communication Strategies phenomena. In collecting the data firstly, the researcher observed theteaching process in English classes. Secondly, transcribing the utterances produced by the English teacher by watching and listening to the video recorder. Thirdly, identifying and giving code in English teacher’s utterances which contain Compensatory Strategies based on Dornyei’s theory. After that, the researcher classifies the data based on its types.

This research reveals seven types of compensatory strategies used by the English teacher. Circumlocution, approximation, use of allpurpose words, nonlinguistic signals, literal translation, codeswitching, and appeal for helps are mostly used by the English teacher.However, those strategies are used with different functions. The main function of those strategies is to compensate the linguistic difficulties. Furthermore, it is used to emphasize the teacher’s idea, simplify teacher’s utterance, and get an agreement from the students. Moreover, the other function is as an effort of the teacher dealing with keeping communication run.

The researcher suggests the English teachers and foreign language learners to employ Compensatory Strategies to maintain the linguistic weaknesses during communicating in English since compensatory strategies will give learning effect because the learners will consider using alternative ways in order to keep the communication run. For the next researchers, they are supposed to obtain the reason of using compensatory strategies by foreign language learners to discover the deep comprehension about the use of Compensatory Strategies.