Speech Pauses Used by Male and Female Students in English Oral Examination

The objective of this descriptive qualitative study
were to discover the types of speech pauses used by male and
female students in English oral examination. The subject of the
study was class XI of MAS Pesantren Arraudhatul Hasanah
Medan which had been choosen randomly. The data were
obtained from the recorded conversation of English oral
examination and then were transcribed. The data were the
male and female students utterances in English oral
examination. The data were identified, analyzed and
categorized based on theory of Rose (1998), Clack & Tree
(2002) in relation to the theory of Tottie (2001) about the
concept of gender and speech pauses. The finding of the study
showed that there were 3 types of speech pause that could be
found in both data of the utterances of male and female
students, namely 1) silent pause, 2) unlexicalized filled pause,
and 3) lexicalized filled pause. Silent pause was the most
frequently type used by male and female students