THE CONVERSATIONAL STRATEGIES WITHIN YOUTUBE BEAUTY VLOGS: A CASE STUDY OF JOAN KIM’S YOUTUBE CHANNEL

YouTube vlogs are commonly known as one way communication platform since they are featured by a single speaker who talks to camera individually. However,this study analyzes the conversation within two beauty vlogs which have two speakers respectively which are the YouTube channel’s owner and her guests. The source of data is a single YouTube channel namely Joan Kim—a popular Korean beauty vlogger. This qualitative study is applied theory proposed by Coates (2013) who suggests that there are seven conversational strategies which are minimal responses, hedges, tag questions, questions, commands and directives, swearing and taboo language, and compliments. This study aimed to identify the conversational strategies used by the beauty vloggers and to explain how these strategies are used. The result of the study shows that all of the conversational strategies are used by the beauty vloggers except the swearing and taboo words which only used by Ivan Lam. It is also found that the way these beauty vloggers used the strategies are quite different. For instance, in the first vlog Joan Kim used more varied hedges such as like, kind of, I’m sure, I think, and you know, while Amy Lee—the fashion guru—only used three hedges repeatedly. Additionally, Ivan Lam, the beauty enthusiast, used hedges more often than others, so his frequency of hedges usage becomes the highest. The study draws conclusion on the fact that all strategies, except swearing words, relate closely to the context of the conversation