GENDER-BASED TEACHER’S POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN BUILDING STUDENTS AND TEACHER INTERACTION

Abstrak

Student-teacher interaction is often influenced by the teachers’ actions and utterances. Therefore, it is important to establish a teacher’s expression during the teaching and learning process. To maintain this interaction, teachers can apply certain expressions of politeness. This study provides the investigation of teachers’ politeness strategies which help them to build the student-teacher interaction. Moreover, since there are different expressions of politeness among male and female teachers, this study also compares the power of politeness strategies in building student-teacher interaction based on the teachers’ gender perspective. Through observing and identifying the teacher’s utterances based on the politeness strategies’ theory of Brown and Levinson, the use of positive politeness strategy is indicated as the strategy that builds most of the students’ willingness to communicate. Student-teacher interaction is developed through positive politeness since this strategy keeps the students positive face by expressing the number of utterances that want to be listened to by the students. Also when investigating male and female teachers during the ELT process, the result shows that female teacher builds more interaction with the students since the female teacher tends to use the positive politeness strategy rather than the male teacher.