TURN TAKING IN THE CLASSROOM INTERACTION AMONG JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS OF DIFFERENT GENDER

This study deals with the turn taking in the classroom interaction by male and female students. The objective of this study were to: 1) find out kinds of turn taking used by male and female students in classroom interaction, 2) elaborate the realization of different gender doing turn taking performed by male and female students and 3) provide the reasons why male and female students perform the turn taking in the way they are. It was applied by using descriptive qualitative research. It was conducted at SMP Negeri 29 Medan involving 15 male and 15 female students. The data were collected through observing, recording and interviewing them. The data of this study were 30 male and female students’ utterances which were taken in the classroom area. The findings showed that 1) turn constructional component dominatly used by male students so did turn allocational component occur in male students’ utterances if compared to female students’ utterances, 2) male students perfomed turn constructional dominantly namely Single Word (SW) was the highest is 52,83%, while female is 48,56%. Then, for the turn allocational component, male students dominantly used Compliment/Rejection (Com/R) was the highest is 44,44%, while female dominantly used Challenge/Rejection is 66,67 and 3) There were two factors causing male and female students doing turn taking in the way they are namely interlocutors and age. The first reason is interlocutor. Male and female students dominantly used single word (SW) when talking to each other. The second reason is age. Male and female students doing turn taking while having interaction with the close friend or someone who has the same age with them.