ABSTRACT
Communicative competence was understood as the underlying systems of knowledge and skill required for communication. It is importance to stress that communicative competence refers to both knowledge and skill in using this knowledge when interacting in actual communication.
Knowledge refers to what one knows (consciously and unconsciously) about the language and about other aspects of communicative language use; skill refers to how well one can perform this knowledge in actual communication. Realizing that either participants or the announcers do not comprehend the communicative competence, therefore they need strategy to convey their messages. Here, communication strategy is the appropriate one to bridge the gap between the speakers and the announcers.
The strategy used by the announcers and the participants in making conversation includes message abandonment, topic avoidance, appeal to the authority, language switch and changing code.
In this study, the objects chosen are the radio announcers who make conversation with the participants in a radio English program of IMELDA FM which is called ‘happy hour’. The method used is qualitative (study case) and emphasized on the description of the conversations. In order to collect the data, I record the conversation using tape recorder and blank cassettes and then the data is analyzed by classifying them into message abandonment, topic avoidance, appeal to the authority, language switch, and changing code.
The framework used is Mujianto’s framework. The results indicated that the announcer and the participants of ‘happy hour’ program have tried to apply communication strategy in conversation.
I hope by learning the communication strategy, the English Speakers of Indonesia particularly and the learners of English in general, can communicate in English well.
