STUDENTS’ COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES DURING SPEAKING ACTIVITY AT SMAS YPIS MAJU BINJAI

The main objectives of this research are to investigate the communication strategies used by students during speaking activity and to know the reason why are the communication strategies used by the students as the ways they are. To achieve these research goals, a qualitative descriptive method was employed. The study focused on the eleventh-grade social class as the target population and utilized purposive sampling to select suitable participants. The data were taken by observation in the question and answer session between the researcher and the learners, video recorder in order to find out what communication strategies used by the students, and interview the students to know the reason why they used the communication strategies as the ways they are. The researcher outcomes shown that there are 125 utterances of communication strategies by Tarone’s taxonomy (1981) Language Switch 36 times (43.9%), Topic Avoidance 12 times (14.63%), Message Abandonment 11 times (13,41%), Mime 7 times (8.54%), Literal Translation 6 times (7.32%), Appear for Assistance 5 times (6.1%), and Approximation 5 times (6.1%). The students use these communication strategies to assist them in actively engaging in interactions using English during classroom activities.