Teachers’ Politeness Strategies in Delivering Feedback on Classroom Presentation of English Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Teachers often use specific strategies to maintain the classroom atmospheres and minimize the social distances among the teachers and the students. One of these strategies is called the politeness strategy. Unfortunately, even though the aim of conducting politeness strategy is to build students-teachers interaction, it is found that the students still respond both positively and negatively toward the teachers’ politeness strategies. Specifically, it happens when the teachers deliver feedback to the students’ presentation. This study enlightens the classroom interaction among the teachers and the students by observing two English teachers’ politeness strategies, and interviewing four students toward their teachers’ politeness strategies. The observations are focused on the teachers’ corrective feedback, and the interviews are maintained on the effect of different teachers’ politeness strategy during the students’ presentation. As the key theory, this study use a theory of politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1978), it focuses on the expressions of the Face Threatening Act (FTA) during communication. The result from the classroom observation showed that the teachers frequently use positive politeness, and avoid negative politeness strategy. On the other hand, to avoid the negative responds, the interviews showed that the students prefer their teachers to use positive politeness strategies in giving feedback since the students prefer to get praise.