COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES EMPLOYED BY INDONESIAN EFL LEARNERS

Communication strategies are very important especially for EFL learners. It needs to be discussed and studied extensively since most students cannot well explore the use of English as a target language. The condition in Indonesia shows that only few students can speak in the target language confidently after learning English for six years or more. Moreover, they often get difficulties when they speak English to communicate with others. To overcome communication barriers, the students can communicate effectively by language mixing, using gesture, asking for correction, or translating words. Those are called communication strategies (CSs). Thus, this article aims to analyze the communication strategies of Tarone’s taxonomy used by students in speaking class at the second semester of English education study program. The research design of this study is descriptive qualitative, all the data are obtained through observation and in depth interview for three students in different level; passive, moderate, and active. The results show that passive level learner used all CSs with frequent of 68 times. While the moderate level learner used some CSs with frequent of 28 times, and the active level learner used only one CSs with frequent of 3 times. In addition, the dominant CSs used by passive and moderate level learner is borrowing and the dominant CSs used by active level learner is paraphrase. Key words: Communication Strategies, EFL, Learner