Communication Strategies Among English Speakers of Indonesia in Conversation Between the Radio Announcers and Their Participants

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

In daily life, people communicate with other from the time they wake up until they go to bed. Communication is a basic human activity, and the basis of all human communication is called language. Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols which permits all people in a given culture, or other people who have learned the system of  that culture, to communicate or to interact (Finocchiaro,1974:3). By means of languages, people are able to convey messages, feelings, and thoughts in their  mind, so that they  can interact with each other. As a devise for communication, language is an effective means of expressing ideas and feeling both in spoken and written form to communicate or to interact with  other people who use the language.

Everything is impossible without language. Furthermore, language gives people a way to communicate easier and helps the people socialize in the society.  The purpose of language is to communicate. Lubis (1988:10) says that one form of communication is the interaction between speakers. The interaction includes the way speaker to convey meaning and express their feeling, how people do with words and utterances and then form good sentences to be sent to other speakers. However, misunderstanding can always occur in daily life conversation, because the speakers do not find appropriate words to express their feeling, even thought the speakers try to use the media of communication properly.

To avoid misunderstanding between the speakers, they usually try to convey the messages hardly and find another way or strategy to convey the messages. Sometimes, when they get stuck in the middle o conversation, they will change the words could not find with mime, gesture, and face expression or translate the words unknown into the native language, even, they laugh in the middle utterance. Since the topic only run to the buses, they use strategies to convey the messages.

There are many situations in which the speakers use communication strategies to transfer messages correctly according to the messages exist. Usually, communication strategies used when the speakers become aware that the words structure seem do not to be shared and the communication is breakdown. Communication strategies used to help them to convey the messages easier and clearer and to bridge the gap between the speakers and listeners, dealing with their misunderstanding. So mutual intelligibility is formed. Mutual intelligibility is a condition when both  speaker and listener find the goals of communication and understand what the linguistics signals sent from another speaker.

To make a clear speech and to avoid misunderstandings, the knowledge that the speakers should master is communicative competence. It is understood as the underlying system of knowledge and skill required for communication. In making communication, communicative competence is very important. I realize  that communicative competence of each people is different The term of communicative competence has been defined in the following ways: 

Communicative competence may be  defined as ability to function in a truly communicative setting that is in a dynamic exchange in which linguistic competence much adopt itself to the total informational input (Savignon quoted by Lubis 1988:1).  Communicative competence was understood as the underlying systems of knowledge and skill required for communication (e.g. knowledge of vocabulary and skill in using the sociolinguistics convention for a given language) (Canale and Swain quoted by Lubis 1988:1).    In Savignon’s definition as quoted by Lubis (1988:1), there is one thing to know about language. There is the suggestion about language or  linguistic competence being or modulated by context. Whereas in Canale, to some extend reflecting the change; there is the notion that the communicative competence as a function of many systems, language being one of them.    Hymes as quoted by Sari (1988:1)   says that in communicative competence, it is involved of seven  components of conversation, there are sender, receiver, message form, channel, code, topic, setting and the interaction between them. A member of participants  needs to be able to function both as speaker and listener and select appropriate message form, channel, and code according to the topic and setting.

In assessing linguistics competence, it is not enough for us to study only in practical or educational purposes. I am  interested not just in the fact that someone knows a language but that he knows how to use it. In this thesis, I try to search about the language, which is spoken by foreigners, and how they????????????????????????