SPEECH ACTS IN THE APPRENTICE ASIA TV PROGRAM

This study is concerned with the use of speech acts in The Apprentice Asia TV program in the boardroom sessions. The objectives of this study were to describe the types of speech acts used by the host, advisors and contestants of The Apprentice Asia, to explain how those types of speech acts were used by them and to explain the reasons why those types of speech acts were used as the ways they were. The source of data in this study were the host, advisors and contestants of The Apprentice Asia, while the data were their utterances gathered from the conversations among them from five episodes. The instrument used for collecting the data was observation from the video recordings of five episodes of The Apprentice Asia. The data were collected by downloading those videos, and transcribing the participants utterances occured in the boardroom, then they were grouped based on the host, advisors and contestants utterances and classified them into the types of speech acts. The findings of this study showed that all types of speech acts, namely representative, directive, commissive, expressive and declarative were used by the host and contestants, while the advisors did not use expressive and declarative. The dominant type of speech act used by the host was directive in the form of questioning, while the advisors and contestants dominantly used representative speech act in the form of informing. The participants performed them by direct, indirect, literal and non-literal way. There were some reasons of using types of speech acts used by all participants. In order to get information from other participants about the performances of the contestants in running the task, type of speech acts used by the host was directive in the form of questioning. On the other hand, the advisors and contestants were the participants whose information required by the host. Therefore, in responding what the host asked to them, they performed their speech acts through representative in the forms of informing.