Politeness Strategy Performed by Students of State Islamic Institute in Classroom Discussions

Keywords: Face Threatening Act, politeness strategy, classroom discussion. This study was aimed at finding out the politeness strategies used to minimize FTA(face threatening act) performed by students of State Islamic Institute of Tulungagung in classroom discussions. The objective of research is at finding out what FTA(face threatening act) are performed by students of State Islamic Institute of Tulungagung in classroom discussions. The next objective of research is at finding out what politeness strategy are performed by students of State Islamic Institute of Tulungagung in classroom discussions. The statement of the research problems are: 1) What face threatening act are performed by students of State Islamic Institute of Tulungagung in classroom discussions?. 2) What politeness strategies are performed by students of State Islamic Institute of Tulungagung in classroom discussions? In this study the researcher applied qualitative approach and conversation analysis. The subjects of this study were the students who was having discussion in seminar on thesis writing class at State Islamic Institute of Tulungagung especially the students of english department in the sixth semester of 2013/2014. The informant were 25 students. This study used students’ utterances containing FTA(face threatening act), politeness strategy and their response to interviews as the data. Based on analysis of the data, the researcher found that the Face Threatening Acts that was performed by the students were classified into 4 classification, FTAs that threaten hearer’s negative and positive face and FTAs that threaten speaker’s positive and negative face. While the politeness strategy performed are positive and negative politeness strategies. From the research the researcher found most of the students oftenly affected hearer’s negative face and hearer’s positive face, only some utterances cited the FTAs that threatened speaker’s positive and negative face. Besides, the students also used the politeness strategy to minimize FTA. The students often used negative politeness strategy, the politeness strategy used only in some utterances. In certain case the speaker performed no politeness strategy, so they used direct instruction using imperative sentence. When the students decided to choose negative politeness strategy, they often used indirect order or suggestion, question, hedge, or question tag. In this classroom discussion when the speaker performed positive politeness strategy they indicated that they prefer using seek agreement, ask/give reason, only in viii certain condition joking was applied. But negative politeness strategy often appeared when the speaker tried to minimize face threatening act. Positive politeness strategy was used to minimize positive face threatening act and negative politeness strategy was used to minimize negative face threatening act, in certain case face threatening act that threaten positive face can be minimize using negative politeness strategy on the basis of certain condition. In this finding politeness strategy not only used to minimize FTAs but in some utterance eventhough there was no FTA, the speaker performed politeness strategy to harmonious communication