Abstract:
Studying the interactions between Indonesian users of Thai as a second language and native speakers of Thai may decrease communication problems between them. To date, few investigations have examined these interactions. Therefore, the present study aims to compare linguistic strategies that both Indonesian users of Thai as a second language and native speakers of Thai use their language for the speech acts of promising, requesting, and asking for personal information. This study follows the perspectives of interlanguage pragmatics and investigates problems and motivational concerns of the interactions based on intercultural pragmatics. The data for this study examines discourse complete tasks (DCTs) and in-depth interviews of 163 informants. The results based on the interlanguage pragmatics revealed that Indonesian users of Thai as a second language and native speakers of Thai faced communication problems when using speech acts of requesting and asking for personal information to some extent. This was because these two groups of speakers had different underlying perspectives. They therefore had different linguistic behaviors. Apart from these strategies, the speech act of promising was found to cause less communication problems, though its linguistic strategies were quite confusing to the interlocutors. The results also showed three types of interaction problems related to intercultural pragmatics: problems caused by different interaction norms, misinterpretation of illocutionary act, and misunderstandings of the meaning of utterances. Indonesian users of Thai as a second language and native speakers of Thai also had different rapport management. The Indonesian users of Thai as a second language tended to focus on sociality rights, specifically association rights. Meanwhile, the native speakers of Thai tended to place higher importance on motivational concerns associated with face management, particularly quality face to maintain relationships during interactions. They also differed in that Indonesian socio-cultural factors related to interaction were Islam religion, Pancasila and shame, whereas Thai socio-cultural factors included /nâa/ (face), /kreeŋjay/ (a fear of troubling another's heart) and /náamjay/ (kindness).