The Differences in Communication Strategies Between Pair, Small Group and the Dominantly Used in Discussion among Inbound Mobility Students

Abstract

Mobility program is an international program among students either in the university or school level, but mostly are among university students. This is because mobility program gives a lot of positive impact to the participants in their study progress, amazing experiences as well as better future exploration. The objectives of this study are to identify the differences in communication strategies used by pair and small group subjects and the dominantly used of communication strategies among inbound mobility students at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The samples of the study consist of 30 respondents and they are only 8 male and 22 female mobility students from Asian and European universities who are attending mobility program at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The methods involved in this study were observation sessions with the subjects. The observation sessions were video-taped. The video-taped were transcribed for analysis afterwards. The study only focuses on the communication strategies used among inbound mobility students and the understanding, opinion and idea of the mobility program to the inbound mobility students at Universiti Putra Malaysia. As for the procedure of the study, the subjects were informed about the observation sessions which were video-taped and discussions are in pair and small group. An area of topics was given to the subjects to be discussed. This study used Communication Strategies Theory by Dornyei& Scott (1997). The results of the study showed that there was large amount of communication strategies used among inbound mobility students at UPM during their conversation discussions. The results also revealed that there were a lot of differences in the use of communication strategies between the pair and small group subjects. There were also a lot of differences in the dominantly used of communication strategies among those two subjects during their discussion. The dominantly used of communication strategies for pair