A Comparative Study of Criticism Strategies Used by Indonesian and Thai Learners of English

This research focused on criticism strategies used by Indonesian and Thai learners of English. The aims of this research are (1) to determine the criticism strategies used by Indonesian learners of English (2) to determine the criticism strategies used by Thai learners of English (3) to describe the similarities and differences of criticism strategies between Indonesian and Thai learners of English. The subject of this research were 25 Indonesian learners of English who studied at UMS and 25 Thai learners of English who studied at Fatony University. The type of this research was descriptive qualitative research. The data of this research was Discourse Completion Task (DCT) which consisted of four situations with different status level. The data were analyzed by Nguyen (2003) criticism strategies. The findings showed that Indonesian and Thai learners of English tended to use indirect criticism as their way to criticize person. The differences of criticism that was used by Thai learners of English are Indonesian learners of English used more combination strategies than Thai learners of English.Indonesian learners more polite than Thai learners of English. Thai learners of English used more direct criticism than Indonesian learners of English, although the dominant strategies is indirect criticism