Abstract Name : Bunga Finny Fadjarna Student Number : 1006102050033 Study Program : English Education Title : The Comparative Study between L1 and L2 Based Strategies in Speaking Class. Key Words : The Communication strategies, Speaking skill, L1 and L2 based strategies. This qualitative study focused on the comparative study between L1 and L2 based strategies used by the students of English Study Program at Teacher Training and Education Faculty, Syiah Kuala University. The participants of this study were twenty seven students of second semester who were chosen randomly. The instrument used in this study was observation that supported with mobile phone audio recording. In the observation, the writer looked at the communication strategies used by the students during learning process in two meetings or 90 minutes each meeting. This study used a theory from Fearch and Kasper (1983) namely code switching, foreignizing, literal translation, substitution, paraphrase, word coinage and restructuring. The result indicated that the most frequently used was literal translation that followed by word coinage, foreignizing, code switching, restructuring, paraphrase, and substitution. This showed that the students of English Program tended to translate L1 form to L2 form to make the interlocutors understand the words they were saying.