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To sum up the elaboration above, conversation is considered as the most basic form of human interaction. English department students of UNNES also
do conversation in the speaking class. In this case, they have to interact with others through doing conversation in the target language to practice their
English. English department students should consider the speaking class as their chance to show their abilities and knowledge in using English. But in
reality, many of them find it very hard to try to involve themselves in a conversation using the target language because of their lack of knowledge and
skill in using sociolinguistic conventions in English. To overcome the problems, they use communication strategies.
2.1.1 Definition of Conversation
Conversation is an enterprise in which one person speaks and another listens, which means conversation happens when there are, at least, two people
engaged in. Conversation is different from talk and people now seem to be able to distinguish it from any other kinds of talk. Talk may be classed as
conversation when: 1 it is not primarily necessitated by a practical task, 2 any unequal power of participants is partially suspended, 3 the number of
participants is small, 4 talk is mainly for the participants and is not for an outside audience Cook, 1989. From this quotation, we can conclude that
conversation has more specific scope than any other kinds of talk because it only needs a small number of participants to be engaged in and does not need
an outside audience.
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Another definition was delivered by David and Derek 1975, who said that conversation is any stretch of continuous speech between two or more
people within audible range of each other who have the mutual intention to communicate, and bounded by the separation of all participants for an
extended period. Jack Richard and Richard Schmidt 1984: 119-120 also give us more view about conversation, as follows:
Conversation is more than merely the exchange of information. When people take a part in conversation, they
bring to the conversational process shared assumptions and expectations about what conversation is, how conversation
develops, and the sort of contribution they are expected to make. When people engage in conversation, they share
communication principles of conversation that lead them to interpret each other’s utterances as contributing to
conversation.
From the above quotation, we may conclude that when people are engaged in a conversation, they not only exchange information or share their
feelings or ideas but they also do much more than that. In doing a conversation they are also involved in the process of conversation itself. We
can also understand that in a conversation, the people are interpreting what is said by others so the speaker of conversation must make himherself
understood by the listener. So it is necessary for both speaker and listener to possess a set of abilities to transfer meaning. If the listener fails to translate the
linguistic signal sent by the speaker, then it will come up with the difficulties in achieving the communication goals.
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2.1.2 Three Kinds of Conversation
