Communicative strategies employed by the eleventh-graders in writing personal letter texts

Abstract

Learners use communicative strategies to overcome their problems during communication, both in spoken and written form. This study analyzed the types of communicative strategy and the factors that affected the eleventh-graders of SMAN 2 Bantul, Indonesia, in writing personal letter texts. This study used discourse analysis. It analyzed 31 personal letter texts written by the eleventh-graders. Data were collected using the documentation technique. In analyzing the data, this study used Tarone’s classification (1980) to analyze the types of communicative strategies and Widiarini’s classification (2019) to classify the factors. The finding showed that three types of communicative strategies used by the eleventh graders of SMA N 2 Bantul were paraphrased (element approximation) = 19%, transfer (literal translation element) = 58%, and Avoidance (message abandonment element) = 22%. Additionally, three factors were affecting the students in using communicative strategies targeting language proficiency = 81%, gender differences 6%, and learner’s personality = 14%. Based on the findings, the highest occurrence of communicative strategies was a literal translation, and the lowest was an approximation. Meanwhile. the highest occurrence of factors that affected the use of communicative strategies was target language proficiency, and the lowest was gender differences. It can be concluded that the choices of literal translation strategy were mostly affected by the target language proficiency factor.