The Analysis of Complaint Expressions Used by the Eighth Semester Students of English Education Program of Purworejo Muhammadiyah University in the Academic Year of 2016/2017

Abstract

This research is aimed to describe the complaint strategies and to discover what the dominant
complaint strategy used by the eighth semester students of English Education Program of
Purworejo Muhammadiyah University in the academic year of 2016/2017. This research is a
descriptive qualitative research, the researcher uses ODCT (Oral Discourse Completion Test) as
the instrument of the research. The research result shows that the participants expressed the
speech act of complaint in eight complaint strategies: Hints, Annoyances, Ill Consequences,
Indirect Accusation, Direct Accusation, Modified Blame, Explicit Blame (Behaviour), and Explicit
Blame (Person). In the Situation 1 (Professor Situation), most of the participants frequently
used the weakest level of complaint strategy namely Hints (50%). In the Situation 2 (Classmate
situation), most of the participants frequently used more aggressive level of complaint strategy
than the first situation, namely Direct Accusation (36.7%). In the Situation 3 (Juniors Situation),
it is found that the participants highly used Modified Blame (33.3%) which is the strongest level
of complaint strategy. This investigation of speech acts has the potential to improve
interpersonal communication in multicultural societies.