THE STUDENTS’ ENGLISH PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE IN UNDERSTANDING CROSSCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: A STUDY AT XI GRADE STUDENT OF SMK NEGERI 1 BATULAYAR

Abstract

This paper investigates the students’ English pragmatic competence in understanding crosscultural
communication. There were eighteen communicative situations designed in three
different speech acts namely; handling complaint, request and refusal. The situations
presented were very similar to the authentic situation that students found during the job
orientation for six months in tourism industry. Three instruments were used in collecting the
data; questionnaires, discourse completion tests (DCTs) and interview. The multiple choice
questionnaire was used to investigate the students’ pragmatic understanding in three deferent
speech acts. Meanwhile DCTs was used to investigate the students’ pragmatic knowledge in
giving response to the given situations related to three different speech acts. Interview
question was used to clarify the missing information and to strengthen the reason why such
responses were given in questionnaire and in DCTs. The sample of this study was 92 XI
Grade students from Hotel Accommodation Program (AP) at SMK Negeri 1 Batulayar. The
result show that the students ability in understanding pragmatic is considered very low, they
only can understand the utterance from the literal meaning of words and phrases, but the
implied meaning of some particular utterances were uneasy to deal with. It is seen from the
reported data that the average of the students’ responses in understanding pragmatics of the
three different speech acts is only 12.7%. The second three different speech acts in discourse
completion test (DCTs) was also about giving response to the complaint, request and refusal.
DCTs were used to investigate the students’ ability in using their pragmatic knowledge to
response the nine situational communicative designed. The finding show that the students’
ability in giving the written response were vary and less impressive. The written responses
in three different speech acts prompt were potentially led to a pragmatic inability in
maintaining the smooth conversation in various situations.