Abstract

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) required students actively participated in communicative events, one of which is in speaking activities. In order to reaching the goal of CLT, communicative competences should be mastered. Afterwards, Canale and Swain (1983) formulated four components of communicative competence which are grammatical competence, discourse competence, strategic competence and sociolinguistic competence. From these four branches, strategic competence would be scrutinized since it is concerned to verbal and non-verbal communication due to insufficient competence. Dörnyei declared there are twelve varieties of communication strategies. Hence, communication strategies, as a part of strategic competence, can solve the problem where students felt difficulties in delivering the goal of their utterances. This study investigated kinds of communication strategies employed by students in debate and the reasons of using them. The subject of study was eight students of grade ten of state Islamic Senior High School 1 Malang who joined English Club in 2017/2018 academic year. Data were collected through debate activities in a session. The instruments used were observation (in the form of video recording) and interview. The result showed that most students employed asking for helps in their utterances due to lack of vocabulary. Eventually, teachers must upgrade their method of learning language in order to develop students’ language competence. We also provide suggestion to train students to minimize the use of communication strategies in delivering messages.
Keywords: communication strategies, debate