Conversational strategies of the main character in The Eat Pray Love Movie

ABSTRACT

Conversational strategies are the ways of people in using language during having conversation in order to avoid misunderstanding among others. It occurs with people who study English as the target language and people who use English as the first language however they are as foreigners in other countries which have different language and culture. In this study, I focus on four countries in “Eat Pray Love” movie. Those are Indonesia, America, Italy and India.

This study is aimed to find out: (1) what type of conversational strategies which are used by the main character of the “Eat Pray Love” movie and (2) how those conversational strategies are used by the main character of the “Eat Pray Love” movie. This study is descriptive qualitative approach because it describes the utterances which are categorized of conversational strategies in the “Eat Pray Love” movie. This research is designed to get deep understanding on the type and ways of conversational strategies in the “Eat Pray Love” movie. I collected the data by watching the movie, downloading the two scripts to compare which one is correct, reading the scripts, watching the movie by using the scripts, choosing the right script, underlining the utterances. I arrange those utterances for analyzing the types and ways of conversational strategies in the “Eat Pray Love” movie by
using Tannen’s (2004) theory.

The findings show that there are many types which are included of conversational strategies in four countries. In Indonesia, the main character uses three strategies: overlapping and latching, high and low pitch and fast rate of speech. In America, she uses four strategies: overlapping and latching, high and low pitch, fast rate of speech and frequent of question. In Italy, she uses three strategies: overlapping and latching, fast rate of speech and tolerance for noise rather than silence. The last is in India, she uses one strategy that is latching. In facial expression and gesture, she uses the same thing when having speaking with all of people in those four countries. However, it is based on the context happen. For examples are nodding when she agrees and understand, knitting her forehead up when she tries to understand and angry, open more her eyes when gets surprise and angry. Moreover, she uses more gestures when she is in Italy because Italian language does not mean anything without using gesture. Therefore, she imitates those gestures to have communication with Italian people in order to make communication perfectly.

I suggest to the next researchers to investigate the other aspect of conversational strategies that is imitation in latching by using the other theory. Since, it does not explore in Tannen’s (2004) theory.