Politeness Strategies Used in English Lecturers’ Classroom Feedback

Feedback is a vital approach used by lecturers to facilitate students’ development in order to monitor, evaluate, and regulate their own language. It is like a double-edged knife in education which can be used to motivate or discourage students. There is linguistic politeness involved in feedback in which what the lecture say in giving feedback – they should also less or zero face threatening. The objectives of this research are to find out different types of politeness strategies, to describe the realization of each politeness, and to elaborate the reasons of politeness used by lecturers in giving feedback. The data were collected through non-participant observation and documentation through recording technique. Four English Department Lecturers at State University of Medan were recorded during their student’s presentation. There are three findings of this research. First, the finding shows that various politeness strategies are used by the four lecturers, such as bald on, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off-record, in which positive politeness is the most used by lecturers in giving feedback. In contrary, off-record are found as the least used by lecturers as they tend to avoid to say something that is ambiguous which in line with the purpose of feedback that is to clear. The second finding describes appealers as the most used by lecturers to realize their politeness in feedback, and researcher only found ten out of sixteen politeness realization types in the feedback given by lecturers to the students. The marker of appealers realization such as the use of right? Oke? Means the lecturers is seeking confirmation or agreement from the students which indicate democracy in the learning process. The last finding show that there are several reasons why the lecturers use such politeness as the way they are. One of them shows that the reasons why lecturers used positive politeness strategies when giving feedback is to minimize the debt implication of FTS. The lecturers tend to soften their statement or command as not to threaten their students’ face in order to enlighten the class environment, to be closer to the students and to avoid frightening the students.