Background of the Topic

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

This first chapter is committed to the discussion of the background knowledge about the topic being studied. This chapter presents the background of the current situation. Further discussion involves the reasons for choosing the topic, research problems, purposes of the study, significance of the study, and outline of the report.

1.1 Background of the Topic

Communication plays important role in human‘s life to convey message through social interaction. Recalling that communication is a basic of human interaction, it is admitted that people cannot be separated from communication to interact with each other. Ehninger et. al. 1978: 206 argues that people will never be able to avoid participating in society. They will naturally interact with others when they would like to convey feelings, ideas, and wants. These, basically, are the most essential functions of language in communication. The case of language, as one of the reflection of people‘s mind is particularly interesting because language plays essential role in thinking and human interaction. Meanwhile, people communicate to reach certain purposes. Burgoon and Ruffner 1978: 7 state that far too long people have equated effective communication with the ability to produce messages that would persuade, entertain or do variety of other things. It can be said that each person has its own mean in doing human interaction, for example to influence other people to agree upon their ideas. Thus, communication can be as a tool to persuade other people in most occasions. Improving communication to gain those purposes can be considered important. The importance of communication skills is true. For instance, performing public communication in front of audience is a basic skill needed by accountants and architects, stockbrokers and politician, lawyer and teacher, and even students. I believe as a student, we need to improve our performance in public communication, especially students who join debate competitions or clubs. They who participate in are considered to master public speaking skill in order to influence the adjudicators. Public speaking is a process, an act and an art of making a speech before an audience Nikitina, 2011: 10. Debate can reflect the method of persuasive speech in order to persuade adjudicator to agree upon the case brought by the team. Suffice to say that debate covers all skills and strategies needed to influence adjudicators. Nowadays, government and some schools are developing debate competitions for high and university level. During recent decade a lot of private or government institutions have tried to proliferate debate competitions because they contribute for improvement of student‘s public speaking skill. Not only students need to comprehend the knowledge but also they should master outstanding public communication to influence and persuade the adjudicators. Recalling the important need of persuasion in debate, it is urgent for debaters to understand persuasive strategies and their usage in order to improve the quality of communication. Based on that consideration, this study is done to give a comprehensive evaluation upon the use of various persuasive strategies.

1.2 Reasons for Choosing the Topic