THE IMPOLITENESS STRATEGIES USED BY TEACHER AND STUDENTS IN CLASSROOM INTERACTION

The objectives of the study were to find out: (1) the types of impoliteness strategies used by teacher and students in classroom interaction, (2) the pattern of responses used by teacher and students in classroom interaction, and (3) the reasons of using language impoliteness in classroom interaction. The study was descriptive qualitative. The subject of the study was class VII-6 of MTS Negeri Tanjung Morawa which had been choosen randomly. The data of the study is the impolite utterances of transcripts which is recorded from the conversation in the classroom interaction. The data were identified, analyzed and categorized based on Culpeper’s (1996, 2003), Bousfield’s (2007), and Beebe’s (1995) theory. The findings of the study showed that: 1) there were five types of impoliteness strategy found in both data of teacher and students, namely: bald on record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness, sarcasm or mock politeness, and withhold politeness; 2) there were four patterns of responses the impoliteness, namely: single or multiple attacks with no response, single or multiple attacks and accepting the impoliteness, OFF-DEF pairings, and OFF-OFF pairings; and 3) The use of language impoliteness in classroom interaction used by teacher and students shared several same reasons, namely: to mock the others, to vent negative feelings, to show power. There were some new reasons of using the language impoliteness in the classroom interaction, namely: to show disagreement, to clarify something clearly, to show dissatisfaction, and to give advice. The most frequent reason of using impoliteness by teacher and student in the classroom interaction was to mock the others and the least frequent reason was to give advice. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that overall teacher and students had equal chance to perform impoliteness in classroom interaction. Some suggestions are directed to those who are interested in understanding impoliteness strategy as found in practice.