Teachers’ Language Style with Reference to Sex Differences in Teaching English

Abstract

The Objectives of this paper are to describe the types of language styles used by male and female teachers in teaching English in the classroom, the realization of those language styles and the reason of the using of them. The study was conducted by using qualitative descriptive research designs.The subjects were four English teachers of SMP Negeri 2 Pancurbatu, namely two male and two female teachers. Based on the data analysis showed that the dominant language styles used by male and female teachers’ utterances in teaching English in the classroom is formal style. Female teachers use formal style more than male teachers do (58,8% : 18,2%). It is found that there is another style, which is called as mix style used by female teacher (8.8%).The language styles of the male and female teachers were different in their realization. The realization of those language styles occured by the way of communication of each teacher. The ways of male teachers in communicating are giving advice, information, conflict, status, and order, while the female teachers communicating are understanding, feeling, support, proposal and order which should be categorized for male. Order also became the dominant realization of way of communication for female teachers. For male teachers, the highly way of communicating is order which is 13 utterances or equal with 38.2% and for female teachers is order with 10 utterances or 29.4%. Based on the research problem, it showed that there are four language style used by male and female teachers, they were slang, colloquial, informal and formal, and the mix style only for female teacher. Independency couldn’t be found for male’s way of communication whereas for female teachers, compromise and intimacy couldn’t be found. There were two factors as the reasons for male and female English teachers to used the languqge styles, namely internal and external factors. The various language styles used by male and female teachers in order to teach the students to be able to comprehend English as their foreign language,through many kinds of way of communication, eventhough there are many internal and external factors disturbed the teaching learning process in the classroom