Gender’s Politeness Strategies of Making Requests and Giving Compliments in Classroom Setting Sociopragmatic Perspeective

Abstract

This present study investigates the form of politeness strategies of making requests and giving compliments performed by different gender in a classroom setting, single teacher and single student, in sociopragmatic perspective. Particularly, this study aims to 1) describe the form of politeness strategies of making requests used by male and female teachers 2) describe the form of politeness strategies of giving compliments performed by male and female teachers, 3) describe the difference form of their politeness strategies of those 2 speech acts and 4) evaluate the factors that may underlie the choice of their politeness strategies of those 2 speech acts in classroom setting. Therefore, the examples of the politeness strategies of 2 speech acts employed by distinct gender were provided in this study. To identify those politeness strategies, Brown and Levinson’s theory (1987) was used as a preliminary identification. In obtaining the data, video recording transcript and interview transcript are collected and then analyzed. The data were the utterances of 2 female and 2 male teachers in classroom setting. The findings show that female teachers tend to use negative politeness strategies more in making requests and both gender tend to use positive politeness strategies in giving compliments in the classroom setting. Their choices were underlied by their closeness to their participants which determined by the character of their participants, the time needed to get close to their participants, the interest of their participants and the topic discussed with their participants. This indicates that the teachers are aware of their pragmatic competence, yet, to create friendlier atmosphere both gender need to advance their ability in using other politeness strategies.