Universal Journal of Educational Research 7(10): 2115-2123, 2019 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/ujer.2019.071009 NL Switching as a Compensatory Strategy of Indonesian EFL School Students and Its Pedagogical Implication Endang Fauziati * , Abdillah Nugroho, Susiati, Muhamad Taufik Hidayat Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, Indonesia Received July 30, 2019; Revised September 16, 2019; Accepted September 23, 2019 Copyright©2019 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract This study aimed to provide an empirical evidence of NL Switching as compensatory strategy of EFL school students in their written communication. The focus was to identify, describe, and explain the linguistic realization and patterns of the NL switching to compensate for their missing language knowledge and proposing its pedagogical implication. The data were in the form of words, phrases, and sentences reflecting NL switching as compensatory strategy, which were elicited from the students’ English free composition and results from interview. The data were identified, described, and explained based on relevant perspectives. The results indicated that the lexical switching as compensatory strategy in communication was in the form of Indonesian naturalized borrowed words from Arabic, Indonesian words, Indonesian cognate, and Indonesian abbreviation, while the syntactical switching was in the form of Indonesian collocation, Indonesian construction, and Indonesian conjunction. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence on NL switching in Indonesian EFL school students' written communication. Keywords Lexical & Syntactical Strategy, NL Switching, Compensatory Strategy, Cultural-loaded Words 1. Introduction EFL classroom is commonly the only place where learners are engaged in communication using English. Sometimes, however, while speaking and writing, they face some difficulties to keep the flow of communication. To overcome this problem they use code switching as compensation strategy. Compensation or compensatory strategy comes under the broader term communication strategies or strategic competence, the strategies employed by creative learners to circumvent their linguistic difficulties or inadequacies in the second language (L2). Dornyei (1997) stated that this term first raised as researchers noticed the mismatch between EFL learners' linguistic resources and communicative intentions which led to language phenomenon whose main function was to cope with problems in L2 communication. He presented taxonomy of communication strategies, consisting of two kinds which reveal two opposite directions in communication, avoiding and compensating. Through avoiding, learners try to avoid topic areas that pose language problems and through compensating, they find ways to compensate for the difficulties. That is to say, compensatory strategies are the ones used by EFL learners in production of the language they are learning. The strategies are made up for compensating an insufficient repertoire of vocabulary and grammar (Oxford, 2003). When facing with problems in expressing their ideas in the target language, EFL learners may find a solution, such as making use of various cognitive compensatory strategies to directly handle the problems. The purpose of the use of compensatory strategies is to make up for an inadequate repertoire of vocabulary and grammar. For this end, EFL learners commonly find solution from their native language (NL), that is, by code switching to their NL in terms of grammar and vocabulary. These strategies are commonly activated when they want to achieve the oral and written communication goal but having insufficient linguistic resources (Olivares & Fonseca, 2013). Oxford (2003) states that compensation strategies enable learners to use the target language for comprehension and production despite their limitations in the knowledge. Compensation strategies are used to make up for an inadequate repertoire of lexical and grammatical knowledge. Oxford (2003) identifies compensatory strategy as one of six major groups of L2 learning strategies, i.e. cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, memory-related strategies, compensatory strategies, affective strategies, social strategies. She (2003) divides compensatory strategy into guessing intelligently and overcoming limitations in speaking and writing. And strategy to overcome limitations consists of eight strategies CITE THIS PAPER [1] Endang Fauziati , Abdillah Nugroho , Susiati , Muhamad Taufik Hidayat , "NL Switching as a Compensatory Strategy of Indonesian EFL School Students and Its Pedagogical Implication," Universal Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 7, No. 10, pp. 2115 - 2123, 2019. DOI: 10.13189/ujer.2019.071009.