Communication Strategies Used by Young Learners in a Bilingual Classroom

Abstract

Many pimary schools nowadays offer an early English exposure for children. However, the status of English remains a foreign language in Indonesia so that English is not used on daily basis.As a consequence, young learners encounter difficulties in communicating, or interacting with their teacher in English. Therefore, they will employ communication strategies to compensate their inadequacy in English.This study investigates what compensating communication strategies that four third grade students of Bethany School used to compensate their inadequacy or "missing knowledge" in English as a foreign language communication.Video recorded interactions between four students and their teacher during lesson were identified using observational protocol derived from a typology of compensatory strategies proposed by Dornyei (1995) cited in Zhang (2007) and Tarone (1977) cited in Nimer (2012).The results showed that the participants used six out of seven compensatory strategies to compensate their inadequacy in English during their conversation with the teacher.This study concludes by suggesting several practical recommendations for teachers of young learners in English- only or bilingual approaches classroom.