The Influence of Lecturers’ Language Style Toward Higher Students’ Psychological Condition in Indonesia

Abstract

Human beings need to interact and communicate with each other in their life. This interaction and communication may appear in different language styles. This is much more influenced by a situation or place where communication takes place. In class, for example, the language utilized by lecturers in the class room is different from others. This research aims at exploring lecturers’ language style and its implication to student’s psychological condition in Indonesia. The main question in this research is what kind of language style used by the lecturer in the learning process? does the using of lecturers’ language style influence students’ psychological condition? What are the factors that affect the presence of lecturers’ language style? This research used the grounded theory method by Keraf language style theory (2006), perlocutionary act theory of Austin (1962), and Leech’s politeness theory (1983). This research was conducted at Institut Agama Islam Negeri Kendari, Indonesia. Observation, in-depth interviews, and documentation were used as data collection. The results indicated that (1) there were two kinds of lecturers’ language styles which are always delivered to students, namely language style based on sentence structures and language style based on directness and indirectness of meaning (2) the using of that language style has a great influence on students’ psychological condition. There are three psychological conditions of the students, they are motivation, self-efficacy, and interpersonal relation. Each of them creates a positive and negative condition, (3) The using of language styles were influenced by some factors, namely culture and ethnicity.