Abstract
This paper attempts to investigate thanking strategies in expressive gratitude used by English Department students as EFL learners. This paper also analyze whether there are any possibilities of difference strategies in expressing gratitude among non-native speaker. This study is important since thanking strategies have a tendency to build relation among interlocutors, Hinkel (1994). The participants in this study were 70 non-native speakers. They were given Discourse Completion Test (DCT) in an attempt to elicit thanking strategies for the data. The data were analyzed, coded and discussed based on the taxonomy of thanking strategies expression gratitude by Cheng (2010). The results show that simple thanking strategies were used by English Department students to express gratitude. Other strategies of thanking strategies expression gratitude were also found in this study.
