Male and female politeness strategies in speaking class : a case study of the second semester students of english education department at UIN Walisongo Semarang in the academic year 2018/2019
Politeness strategies are strategies used to save interlocutor’s face and to minimize threat by using polite utterances when speaking. Politeness strategies are very important to learn for everyone especially for students in order that they can communicate appropriately and politely when they are communicating with different people who have different social status and power, different context, and different situation so that there is no friction and misunderstanding and to build good relationship with one another. The aims of this study were to find out 1) what politeness strategy frequently employed by male students in speaking class, 2) what politeness strategy frequently employed by female students in speaking class, and 3) whether there is the different use of politeness strategies between male and female or not. The research was conducted in UIN Walisongo Semarang, and the research subjects were the second semester students of English Education Department. The type of research is a case study using descriptive qualitative research method which described phenomena of politeness strategies based on the theory of Brown and Levinson. The method of collecting data was recording using mobile phone that recorded the entire classroom activities from beginning up to the end of the class. The methods of analyzing data were the techniques proposed by Males and Huberman, namely data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The results of the study showed that the most dominant strategy used by male students was positive politeness, the most dominant strategy used by female students was bald on record, and there were different uses of politeness strategies, namely female used off record especially sub-strategy being vague while male did not, male used jokes in their positive politeness while female did not, female used promise on their positive politeness while male did not. In addition, the results of the study produced some pedagogical implications as recommendations for teachers to be used in teaching English in EFL classroom.