SCRUTINIZING COMPLIMENT RESPONSE STRATEGY IN TEACHING ENGLISH AS FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN INDONESIA

Teaching compliment expression might be challenging for Indonesian EFL teacher, especially presenting compliment responses in some certain context of situation. The present study aims at investigating the compliment response strategies in some learning resources used by English teachers in Indonesia. The subjects of this study are the two EFL textbooks written by non-native English speakers and the supplementary materials derived from two Youtube channels and two materials from online learning websites created by native English speakers. The finding revealed accepting was the common compliment response strategy represented in all learning resources. it is also noted that the supplementary materials have various compliment response strategies completed with the meta-pragmatic information on each dialogue. The study implied that the EFL students should be equipped with pragmatic and sociolinguistic information in order to achieve the successful communication.


INTRODUCTION
EFL learners need communication competence to achieve the goal of communication. One of the communication competencies is pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence is the basic element of communication. When an EFL leaner tries to use the language in the target language context, she or he will find pragmatic bariers although she or he had well mastered the lexical and grammatical aspect. The lack of ability to apply pragmatic competence based on the interlocutor, why, when, and what is the topic being discussed will result in misunderstanding or pragmatic failure (Hymes, 1974); Amaya, 2008 ;Djatmika, 2016). As an illustration, an Indonesian student had a chance to have small conversation with the English native speaker. The student is a Javanese boy wearing batik, an Indonesian icon for clothing. The native speaker is amazed with the student's shirt by saying "Your shirt is really awesome". The student replies the compliment by saying "Oh no, it is my old shirt" (with red blushing cheek). The illustration shows the native speaker expression in giving compliment. Native speakers are usually expressive in giving compliment especially for appearance topic. They will flatter people when they see something interesting. In this context, he is interested with the Batik worned by the Indonesian student. However, the student's response reflects his culture background where most of Indonesian people especially Javanese tend to express humilty as to maintain social relationship (Sukarno, 2015). As a result, the response uttered is denial. In the illustration context, the Indonesian student denies the compliment by saying "Oh no, it is my old shirt" and it is a mitigation strategy to safe his shy face. He actually wants to say "Yes, thank you. But this shirt is old". Yet for the native speaker as the interlocutor, the utterance "Oh No, it is my old shirt" means that it is a refusal of the compliment. Thus, it is urgent to integrate pragmatic competence in EFL classroom to equip them in the real-life communication.
However, in fact many studies had revealed that pragmatic competence is introduced partially in EFL textbook (Rasekh, 2005;Deda, 2013;Suryoputro & Suyatno, 2017). Compare to other teaching media, textbook becomes a fundamental tool in teaching and learning English as foreign language. This is in line with Vellenga (2004) who states textbook are among the most important instructional materials foreign language learning. Therefore, textbook should provide eduqate sufficient information to EFL learners helping them understanding the language and its context. Linguistic scholars and language educators do agree that EFL leaners should be equipped with pragmatic knowledge to achieve the succeed in communication. Considering the important of pragmatic competence in EFL classroom, material developers should take into account pragmatic features that should be integrated in the EFL textbooks. Textbooks do not only provide lexical and grammatical aspects but also, they have to present pragmatic content that is urgently needed for the successful EFL learning.
In Indonesia, English is taught since in the level of Junior High School. Since then, the students are introduced with some kinds of speech acts functions namely requesting, commenting, thanking, congratulating, complimenting, etc. Among the speech acts, compliment is the most frequently occurring in daily conversation. People uttered compliment when they want to express their appreciation on succesfulness, appearance, achievement, etc. Compliment expression may increase solidarity between speaker and hearer (Retnowaty, 2018). The present study focuses on compliment expression due to some reasons. The first is compliment expression is presented in the syllabus of Senior High School Grade X (ten). Thus, it should be taken into account in terms of the content of the material both in textbooks or other learning resources. The second is compliments are one of speech acts which frequently occurs in daily conversation. Although it is a common expression in daily life yet compliment remains some problems especially for the way to respond it. Morever, as lingua Franca, English is used among ASIA countries. Therefore, EFL students should be equipped by various compliments expression together with crosscultural metapragmatic information in order to avoid misunderstanding.
Pragmatic studies dealing with speech function complimenting have been conducted in oral communication. Chen (2011) and Telaumbanua (2012) studied about complimenting as one of pragmatic competences is taught in EFL classroom. Both studies investigated the strategy of giving and responding compliments uttered by Indonesia and Chinese EFL learners. Chen's study revealed there was a positive instructional effect on the Chinese leaners' pragmatic ability to produce compliment exchanges in English and it retained in the longer term. In line with the context of complimenting strategy implemented in the classroom, Telaumbanua proved that compliment can be used as the opener strategy in EFL speaking class. The teachers can use compliment strategy in order to bridge the leaners to strike up with the conversation by providing short talk beforehand. Unfortunately, both Chen and Telambanua did not represent the strategy and speech function of students' utterances in complimenting which is worthed to be scrutinized. By understanding the students' utterances in complimenting in the target language, it can measure to what extent the students' pragmatic competence and crosscultural understanding involved in the teaching and learning process. Moreover, it is interesting to focus on complimenting responses as it reflects the social-cultural standards and varieties of certain speech communities (Shahsavari, et.al., 2014). As stated by Knapp, et.al. (1984) compliments can have face threatening act and people could be defensive, uneasy or even doubtful. Thus, they may find a dilemma in responding such compliments. As compliment response relates to social and cultural of a certain community, studies on compliment response under the issue of gender and interlanguage are quite various.
Studies on compliment response strategy under the issue of gender in the context of EFL classroom have been conducted by Al Falasi (2007), Cai (2012), Ghanbaran, et.al. (2014), Shabani&Zeinali, (2015, and Al-rousan, et.al. (2016). Based on Al Falasi study Arabic female students of English transfer some of their L1 pragmatic norms to L2 because they identify these norms to be universal among languages rather than being language specific. Chai (2012) revealed Chinese females college students tend to use explicit acceptance strategy than the males. Meanwhile, the male students prefer to use deflection and rejection strategies. Al rousan (2016) studied about compliment response among female and male Jordanian University students. The finding of study revealed both males and females tended to use agreement strategies more than non agreement and other interpretation strategies. The female students preferred using agreement strategies more frequently to the male students. The result may support the claim that males tend to interpret compliment as FTA. Shabani & Zeinali (2015) noted that in delivering compliment response, Persian female students tended to use intensifier more frequently than male students. Pragmatic studies regarding to compliment response in the context of Indonesian EFL students were conducted by Sari (2009), Cedar & Setiadi (2016, and Retnowaty (2018). Cedar and Setiadi (2016) noted that Indonesian EFL students tend to deny compliments while Thai students are prone to accepting compliments. Moreover, Indonesian EFL students favored to be more positive towards compliments on ability and more negative on possession. Compare to Thai students, they favored to be more positive towards possession and more negative on appearance. Another interesting finding of their research was Indonesian EFL learners used some uncommon compliment response strategies such as hope, joking and promise which is not identified previously in English compliment strategy. Based on the data of utterances in Sary and Retnowaty's studies, Indonesian students tended to use acceptance or appreciation token strategy. The students prefered uttering "thank you" in responding compliment. Based on the previous research findings, they indicate that EFL's teachers in Indonesia should provide more space in their materials about compliment responses and help in highlighting the significance of this aspect of pragmatic knowledge.
The insufficiency of the variation of compliment and compliement response strategy had been investigated by Waliyadin & Pertraki (2020). They evaluated the content of compliment expression and compliment response in three Indonesian ELT textbooks namely "When English Rings a Bell for grade 8", "Bahasa Inggris, Think Globally Act Locally for grade 9", and "Bahasa Inggris for grade 10". Their research scope covered the linguistic presentation of compliment expression in terms of range and frequency of compliment response strategies, the sequential of organization of compliment expressions and compliment responses, and the sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects in the presentation of compliment expressions and compliment responses including appropriate contexts and topics, effect of social and situational variables (age, status, gender, social distance, and setting) (Billmyer, 1990). The findings of the research revealed the frequency of syntactic structure in complimentary material is NP looks/is (intensifier) ADJ which account for 50,4% out of 36 compliments in three textbooks. Meanwhile, there are three syntactic structure which is commonly used in American English corpus proposed by Wolfon & Manes (1981) that are not exist in the textbooks such as You V NP (really) ADV; Yiu have (a) really ADJ NP; and Isn't NP ADJ. From the analysis of variety of compliment response strategy, it showed that acceptance with appreciation token is the most common strategy applied which account for 74 % out of 27 compliment responses across three textbooks. There are merely four CR strategies realized in the dialogues, namely acceptance with appreciation token, acceptance with agreeing utterance, and evading with request assurance and informative comment. It means that the variation of compliment response strategies in the three textbooks are indeed insufficient. Moreover, based on the sociopragmatic point of view, there are four variables presented in the textbooks namely topics, gender differences, social status and settings (Rees-Miller, 2011). The compliment's topics includes performance/ability, possession, appearance, and personality is the most common topic used in the complimenting conversations. The percentage of performance topic accounts for 53.8% of 24 compliments. For gender variable, the textbooks presented interactions between females as compliment givers and receivers respectively (41.7%). Meanwhile, for the status variable, the conversations in the textbooks are dominated by the same age which accounts of 75%. There are minimum portion of compliments given by higher status to the lower status interactants, for instance from a teacher to a student or from parents to children and vice versa. In terms of setting, the complimenting dialogues mostly happen in goal-oriented activities, such as the classroom, camping ground, home, and concert. The study implied that the textbooks are inadequate in presenting various compliment expression and responses authentically and they need to be revised.
Regarding to the previous study of compliments response revealed the various strategies used by various variables in terms of gender and nationality. It is because responding a compliment has close relationship with the cultural background of the locutors. The study of the EFL students in Indonesia revealed they tended deny the compliment. Another compliment response strategy which is commonly used is acceptance or appreciation token such as "thank you". The previous study implied that most Indonesian EFL students had limited various compliment strategy. It is supported by research of compliment expression and compliment response presented in EFL textbook in Indonesia. The study showed the materials in the textbook especially for compliment strategy are mostly dominated by acceptance or appreciation token strategy. Textbooks should be the basis of the teaching and learning especially for language classroom. A good textbook can accommodate teachers to develop the teaching and learning practice to be more active and interesting (Surtikanti, 2020).
However, the existing studies of compliment response found in the literature merely focus on the content in the textbook. As a result, the analysis is still partially on a certain teaching resource, namely textbook. In fact, teaching materials can be derived from some resources namely texbooks, handout, video, learning websites, and so on. In the case of online learning during the outbreak of COVID-19, the teachers tended to find other teaching materials especially for teaching compliments topic. An effective teacher can overcome this problem by finding another teaching idea such as collecting and analyzing authentic language samples used in the classroom (Bardovi-Harlig, 1966;Vellenga, 2004). The preliminary study also found out that Youtube and online teaching websites are the teaching resources which are commonly used by the teachers. According to the teachers, the textbooks does not provide sufficient examples dialogues of compliment response. Most of English textbooks in Indonesia is written by non-native speakers. To present various pragmatic competences, the English teachers find the authentic materials from online learning paltforms created by native speakers. Thus, they prefer to complete it with the videos and handouts taken from those resources. Teachers need various materials in order to build interesting atmosphere in the online classroom. This is in line with Agung, et.al. (2020) stating that there are many challenges in the online teaching English during COVID 19 pandemic. One of them is presenting interesting and understandable materials for the students. During online learning, students had limited interactions with the teacher. Thus, providing proper and condense materials should be taken into account. The present study scrutinizes the compliment response strategy presented in the two EFL textbooks namely Modul Pembelajaran SMA Bahasa Inggris (Appandi,2020) and Mandiri English SMA: English on Target (Sarwoko, 2014), written by non-native English speakers compared to materials in the e-learning platforms. This study tries to answer the gap of to what extent the compliment response strategy represented in the most frequently used English textbooks and the supplementary materials available in the e-learning platform such as https://www.eslfast.com and https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org and from American English and ETJ English Youtube Channel.
It has been mentioned above that giving or responding compliment relates to culture background of a speaker. Holmes (1988) states responding to a compliment without any knowledge of the culture and its norms can very threatening. In 1986, Holmes conducted research on complimenting behavior. She gathered 500 compliments responses derived form New Zealand English speakers. The focus of her study analyzed the lexical and syntactic patterns of compliments and the functional categories of compliment responses. Based on her findings, she proposed taxonomy of compliment strategies which are dividied into three macro level namely Accept, Reject, dan Deflect/Evade. Each macro consists of some micro level, for instance appreciation token (thank you), agreeing (Yes, I know), downgrading (it's nothing), utterance (I enjoyed doing it), and returning compliment (You've got beautiful too) are the aspects of micro level in Accept. For micro level in reject there are disagreeing (No, it was good), questioning (really?), and challenge sincerity (come on). Meanwhile deflect or evade consists of three micro level, they are shift credit (that's what friends are for), informative comment (it was nit hard0, and request reassurance (really).
Actually, the first studies on compliment response came from Pomerantz (1978). She found out that Americans have two dilemmas when responding to compliments. First, they have to agree with the speaker (acceptance); and the second, they have to avoid selfpraise (self-praise avoidance). Herbert (1990) revised Pomerantz's taxonomy. He studied American English speakers' compliment responses by collecting more than a thousand samples of compliment responses from American college students in a threeyears period project (Al Falasy, 2007). Herbert findings conveyed a threecategory, twelvetype taxonomy of compliment responses such as agreement, non agreement, and other interpretations. The development of study related to compliment studies has been growing rapidly. There were also a number of contrastive studies by comparing compliment responses in different language for instance, Asian speakers were likely to reject compliments (Urano, 1988), Arabic and South African English speakers tended to accept the complimehts rather than reject them (Al Falasy, 2007), and Chinese non-native speakers of English tended to reject while American native speakers tended to accept and appreciate the compliments.
Altough there are numbers of compliment studies available in the literature, the study on the comparation between compliment strategy represented in the materials arranged by non-native English speakers and native English speakers in the context of teaching English as foreign language in Indonesia is worth conducted. The present study analyzes compliment strategy represented in the three textbooks written by non-native English speaker, and videos from Youtube and digital handout from ESL websites created by native speaker of English which are frequently used by the Indonesian teachers. The materials are analyzed according to Holmes' taxonomy (1988).

Research design
This study utilized pragmatic content analysis as a method to analyze the compliment response strategies in the EFL textbooks (written by non-native English textbook writers) and compliment response videos from Youtube and materials from online English learning website (created by native English). Content analysis is a research method employing valid and reliable interpretations from the content of the observed texts. (Krippendorf, 2004). The present study employed compliment response strategies proposed by Holmes (1988) in order to investigate the compliment response strategy containing in the materials of textbooks, videos, and online learning websites.

Subjects
The subjects of this study were two English textbooks namely Modul Pembelajaran SMA Bahasa Inggris (Appandi,2020) and Mandiri English SMA: English on Target  Based on the above data, the researcher used the most frequently materials resources in teaching compliments to the Indonesian EFL students.

Research procedure
To collect the corpus data of compliment response strategy as the main data of the present study, the researcher had a premilinary study in order to find out the teachers' reasons in finding supplementary materials aside from the textbooks, and the most frequently used for compliment expression materials used by the teachers. This data is important to determine the source of data for the present study. Therefore, the questionnaire was given to the English teachers who taught compliment expression. After getting the source of data, the researcher reduced the data by shorting it until it remained the data of compliment responses. As it is a pragmatic study, the researcher put the data within its contexts in order to have valid interpretations. The compliment strategies are analyzed using Holmes' taxonomy (1988) in order to find out the pattern among textbooks, videos, and online learning website. Finally, the data are displayed and interpreted using certain theories of pragmatic and the previous related studies.

Result and Analysis
The following section present the findings of analysis of the realization of compliments strategy in three kinds of teaching and learning resources. The researcher analyzed the compliment response materials using Holmes taxonomy which consists of Accept: Appreciation Token (AP), Aggreing Utterance (AU), Downgrading (DG), Utterance (UT), Return Compliment (RC); Reject: Disagreeing Utterance (DU), Question Accuracy (QU), Challenge Sincerity (CS); and Evade: Shift Credit (SC), Informative Comment (IC), Request Reassurance (RC). The findings revealed the most frequent strategy employed in the materials is accepting with appreciation token expression. It can be seen through the percentage of each learning resources which dominates amongst other strategies. The second rank is accepting with utterances. Surprisingly, evade strategy is commonly used in responding compliment both in the textbook written by non-native speaker of English and the supplementary materials created by native speaker of English. Meanwhile, there is a few rejecting strategies implemented amongst the teaching and learning resources. The result of the analysis can be seen in the below Table 2. Modul Pembelajaran SMA Bahasa Inggris has relatively complete strategy compared to Mandiri English SMA: English on Target. It has accepting strategy consists of appreciation token (e.g., "Thanks", "Thank you for saying that"), Agreeing Utterance (e.g. "It's alright, Mum"), Utterance (e.g. "I studied hard for that", "I enjoyed it", "I'm glad you think so"), and Return Compliment (e.g., "You, too"). For evade strategy, Modul Pembelajaran SMA Bahasa Inggris presents Informative Comment (e.g., "The price isn't too expensive", "I found these new shoes earlier at the store."), and Request Reassurance (e.g., "Really?", "Is that right?'). Meanwhile, Mandiri English SMA: English on Target merely presents accepting strategies namely appreciation token (e.g., "Thanks a lot for your appreciation", "Thanks a lot for your compliment"), utterance (e.g., "You're so kind to say that", "That's too sweet"), and Return Compliment (e.g. "You've made my day", "You've given me great encouragement").
Different from the two textbooks, the supplementary materials come from Youtube and online learning websites presents various compliment response strategies which can be used in different context of situation. Youtube channel Speak Confident English, for example, it presents the three compliment strategies namely accept, reject, and evade. They are Accept (e.g "Thank you so much"), reject (e.g. "This skirt? Oh no, it's so old), and evade (e.g., "Oh my gosh, I was so nervous"). ETJ English presents some compliments response of accepting by giving the illustration of the context of situation. The responses are "Thank you", "Cheers!", "You're so kind", and "It means a lot"). From the online websites, ESL and British Council also presents various compliment response strategies namely accept (Appreciation token e.g., "Thank you. I just got this outfit the other day.", utterance e.g., "I appreciate that", "I'm flattered", Return Compliment e.g., "Well, I think you look nice today too."); reject (Question Accuracy e.g., "You do? I just bought this outfit a couple days ago."); and evade (Request Reassurance e.g., "Do you think so?").
The researcher also noted that the most common topic for the compliment expression materials in the textbooks is ability/performance. Meanwhile, the materials from Youtube and online learning websites are mostly dominated by appearance topics. This is in line with the previous study saying that Asian people tended to compliment others under the topic of ability, while American and English favored delivering compliment about appearance (Al Falasy, 2007;Holmes, 1988;Shahsavari, et.al., 2014;Shabani & Zeinaldi, 2015;Walyadi, 2020). As compliment responses are closely related to the cultural background of the speaker.
Besides, the researcher also observed the meta-pragmatic information employed in the learning resources. Both textbooks present unadequate meta-pragmatic information. Meta-pragmatic information relates to when, where, and to whom the expression is appropriate and to perform a particular speech act and what expression would or would not be appropriate in a particular context of culture and situation (Nguyen, 2011). The textbooks seem presented two typical ways of compliment expressions namely using dialogues and using list of useful expressions. For instance, in the Modul Pembelajaran SMA Bahasa Inggris there are three short dialogues which are presented with pictures. Figure 1 shows the short dialogue taken from Modul Pembelajaran SMA Bahasa Inggris.  Figure 1 shows that the meta-pragmatic information is presented explicitly through the pictures covering when, where, and to whom. The first picture describes a conversation between a mother and a daughter in the kitchen. The daughter helps her mom washing the dishes, then the mother expreses her compliment to her daughter by saying "Thank you for helping me. You are a very diligent girl". The daugther's response is "It's alright, Mum". The second dialogue is about giving compliment on a friend's achievement. The context of situation is on graduation. The girl said "You are amazing. You become the best student in our graduation", then the boy replied "Thanks. I studied hard for that". Another short dialogue was also found. Figure 2 shows the example of the dialogue. The meta-pragmatic information in dialogue 3 is explicitly described through the picture of two women wearing fashionable clothes and accessories. The compliment topic is about appearance of both women. However, dialogue 1,2, and 3 are fail to present sufficient meta-pragmatic information in terms of distance (D), power (P) and degree of imposition of the speech act involved (R) (Brown & Levinson, 1987). The students need to know about the distance, power, degree of imposition because responding a compliment should take into account the social element in order to avoid the pragmatic failure.
Besides, the insufficiency of information also could be found in the list of compliment response as seen in the Figure 3 where there was no information about when, where, and to whom it was appropriate to perform the compliment responses. List of compliment responses in Figure 3 do not show the relationship between the locutor and interlocutor, or the imposition of one and another. There was not also a description of the contextual variables that could help to judge the degree of imposition of the speech acts involved (Brown and Levinson, 1987). Based on the data, the two textbooks have inadequate meta-pragmatic information as a source to gain pragmatic competence. This is in line with some related studies which found that there was a dearth of pragmatic information contained in the textbooks and the variety of pragmatic information was limited (Peiying, 2007;Wichien & Aksornjarung, 2011, Inawati, 2016, Suryoputro & Suyatno, 2017, Walyadin, 2020. Compared to the videos and the materialas from online learning websites created by native speaker, they presented the compliment expressions and compliment responses through the examples of certain events. They described the illustration of the context of situation and gave the appropriate compliment responses in order to achieve successful communication. Thus, the meta-pragmatic information is adequate enough to equip the students with the real-life communication although some information regarding to the degree and power of the locutor and interlocutor are not always well presented. Figure 4 shows the example of the lecture video about responding to a compliment from Speak Confident Englsih.  Figure 4 shows the examples of the way to respond to a compliment in certain situation. The researcher also found out that the compliment response materials both in videos and online learning websites can be used to build the conversation so the communication keep on going. Figure 5 presents the examples of the communicative response for a compliment. The dialogue shows that compliment can maintain social relationship. Thus, the response toward a compliment should also keep the communication keep going. As stated by Heidari et al. (2009), compliment responses play an important role in establishing and preserving the solidarity of interpersonal relationships. The modeling of the responses should be as authentic as possible in order to prepare the EFL students in Indonesia to be skillfull enough when they have conversation with native speaker dealing with responding a compliment.

CONCLUSION
The present study was mainly concerned with compliment responses presented in the two EFL textbooks in Indonesia written by non-native speaker and the supplementary materials derived from two Youtube Channel, Speak Confident English and ETJ English, and two online learning websites, learnenglish.britishcouncil.org and ESL. The findings revealed that accepting strategy namely appreciation token and utterance are the most commonly presented in all the learning resources. the researcher also highlited those supplementary materials provide various compliment response strategy rather than the materials in the two textbooks. The meta-pragmatic information available in the textbooks seems inadequate rather than the supplementary materials. The ways of responding a compliment are various in the supplementary based on the context of situation. These ways can also be used as building interpersonal communication between the locutor and the interlocutor.
The present study implies that Indonesian EFL students should be equipped with authentic conversation with the native speaker in order to build their pragmatic and sociolinguistic awareness beside the syntactic structure of the utterance. Compliment response should be presented as communicative as possible in order to make the communication keeps going. Therefore, the Indonesian teachers' effort should be appreciated since they tried to complete the materials in teaching compliment expression spesifically on compliment response. Further research regarding to developing a textbook containing adequate dialogues as well as meta-pragmatic information is worth to conduct in order to bridge the gap in teaching English integrated with pragmatic competence in Indonesia.