Communication strategies used by Islamic boarding school EFL students in small group discussion

To communicate fluently and effortlessly in English is not an easy task for every EFL student. Like many others, Islamic boarding school students tend to experience difficulty in finding the right words and constructing clear sentences to convey their thoughts. As an alternative, Communication Strategies (CSs) can be applied in the classroom to overcome this communication problem. This descriptive qualitative research intended to analyze the types of CSs used by the Islamic boarding school EFL students in small group discussion as well as their reasons for using the dominant type of CSs. The participants were eleventh-grade students at Ruhul Islam Anak Bangsa Islamic Boarding School. 10 students (N=10) were purposively chosen. The data were collected through observation and interview and then qualitatively analyzed based on Dornyei’s (1995) taxonomy of CSs. The results show that the students employed all 12 types of the CSs. However, the most frequent strategy was the use of fillers and hesitation devices. Inadequate vocabulary knowledge was the main reason why students used fillers. Nervousness and content difficulty also motivated CS use.