STATUS AND POWER REFLECTED BETWEEN TEACHER AND STUDENT IN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM (A CASE IN RINSO’S ADVERTISEMENT) by Muhimatul Ifadah* Abstrak Sudah menjadi kesepakatan umum bahwa bahasa digunakan sebagai media ataupun alat komunikasi. Bahasa merupakan sebuah sistim yang sudah terorganisir dimana setiap unit mempunyai peran yang sangat penting yang juga sangat penting bagi unit unit yang lain. Di sisi lain, bahasa merupakan fenomena social, yang dapat dimaknai sebagai alat komunikasi antara orang per orang. Sebagai sebuah fenomena social, maka kemampuan bahasa seseorang berkembang sesuai dengan lingkungan dan siapa saja yang berada dalam lingkungan tersebut. Beberapa ahli menyatakan bahwa bahasa sebetulnya sebuah ilmu yang kompleks, tidak ada satupun sistim bahasa yang lebih mudah ataupun lebih buruk daripada yang lain. Komunikasi akan terjalin manakala pesan yang disampaikan oleh pembicara dapat diterima oleh sang pendengar/pembaca; selama mereka tidak berbagi konsep yang sama, maka komunikasi tidak akan berjalan dengan baik. Dalam pragmatic, pesan yang disampaikan oleh pembicara bisa saja dimaknai lain karena beberapa factor, seperti misalnya facial gestures ataupun mimic muka yang menyiratkan hal yang berbeda dengan pesan yang semestinya. Perbedaan status ataupun background , jenis kelamin, umur, dan juga power antara pembicara dan penerima pesan tidak dipungkiri sering menyebabkan penafsiran yang berbeda yang akan menyebabkan terhambatnya proses komunikasi, sehingga bisa dikatakan bahwa tujuan dari komunikasi yang efektif tidak terjadi. Hal ini pula yang masih sering terjadi dalm lingkup ruang kelas yang melibatkan antara guru dan murid dalam interaksinya. Perbedaan status dan power antara guru dan murid sering menyebabkan proses belajar mengajar menjadi tendensius, sehingga tujuan dari pengajaran mendapatkan kendala. Untuk memahami itu semua, setiap pembicara dan penerima atau pendengar harus memahami dan menerima prinsip komunikasi,dalam arti mampu menterjemahkan segala factor non bahasa yang terjadi secara berdampingan dengan proses komunikasi, agar proses komunikasi berjalan dengan baik, sehingga tujuan dari komunikasi akan berhasil dicapai. Kata kunci: classroom interaction,power, status,politeness. A. Introduction anguage on society should have something to say about the numerous attempts that have been made to change a particular variety of a language, or a particular language, or some aspects of how either of these functions in the society. How people accept differences between people will be affected by their understanding the various kind of tribes, characters, and also the way of thinking. * Penulis adalah Staf Pengajar di PBI FBBA UNIMUS L Politeness phenomena status as universal principles of human interaction is reflected in language. Societies everywhere, no matter what their degree of isolation or their socioeconomic complexity, show these same principles at work; yet what counts as polite may differ from group to group, from situation to situation, or from individual to individual. Issues bearing upon politeness have emerged as being of central interest in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, applied linguistics, social psychology, and conversation analysis. Most of the time, people are keeping in touch with others because they live in a society. In a society, there will be many values, faiths, habits, and norms that may different from one to each other. In larger scope, students will face real situation which demand them to be a person who has a good character. How people cope with the society is much affected by their experience and how they interpret the discourse. The students have to get chances to explore their character and applying it. Interpreting, which is one of the language skills, emphasizes not only in giving meaning the sentences literally, but also understanding discourses. Many words and acts deliver different meaning for the receiver because of the diversity. How students set those discourse can be trained in classroom, by taking part in different environment, roles, profession, and also activities. They should know that the difference will create new discourses also, and improper interpretation will cause misunderstanding and also misperception that may disturb or make the message failed to be revealed. Vocabularies bring important message for them who used, because words sometimes aimed to represent someone’s intention. If words given meaning literally without an understanding the discourse, there will be may any unrevealed deep meaning, because words need to be explained pragmatically also, that is the use of understanding many kind of social contextual discourses. Interpreting can be said successful, if the text or the discourses is given meaning like it should be so, and people become familiar, understand, and able to perceive the message. Interpreting needs a broad knowledge not only about literally, but also social, political, culture, and etc. Those aspects help someone to reveal message without bias and judgment, and in interpreting, being objective is necessary. A text or discourse can not be interpreted as the interpreter wish, because it may destruct the meaning. All of us have theories about education, about health, about art; about choose in our life and many topics for ourselves. Our theories sometimes are different with the others, but sometimes the opposite. People will always need the others to fulfill their needs. Because it is undeniable that human is social being, that cannot life alone. One way to fulfill the need is by socialization that needs communication, both spoken and written. When doing communication, people cannot choose to whom they just want to talk. People with different background or profession, age, sex, will have chance or opportunity to do communication to whoever they meet and get along. Even though, some people do communication with those who have the same purpose or at least almost share the same wants, for example; lawyer and judge or suspect, teacher and student, consumer and seller, and many others. Individual and social purposes and role relationships are complex and from this we can get many things to discuss. Roles are also related to the complicated issues of power and authority. In most academic classrooms students ask questions, and on rare opportunity may be able to negotiate their assignment, but they are seldom able to negotiate class content or grades. In same part of the world, students view this power relationship as icon “students vs. teacher”. The students bring with them their whole experience of learning and of life in classrooms, along with their own reasons for being there, and their own particular needs that they hope to see satisfied. And the teacher brings experience too, of life and learning, and of teaching. But no matter what they all bring, everything still depends on how they react to each other (student to student as well as teacher to student) when they all get together in the classroom. Many people agree that learning will be more effective when the learners enjoy the process, and of course, this is not easy as we thought. The success of classroom interaction can not be guaranteed just by exhaustive planning either: if the interaction is totally planned in advance the result is a play-reading, rather than a lesson. Interaction, in class or anywhere, has to be managed, as it goes along, no matter how much thought has gone into it beforehand. In a classroom, of course it is usually considered normal for the teacher to ‘run the show’-to make many of the managerial decisions about who should talk, to whom, on what topic, in what language, and so on, but none of this alters the fact that everything depends on the learners ‘co- operation. We all know how easy it is for one or two unco-operative students to spoil everything, to make a classroom a miserable place to work in. in a sense, the learners have power of veto over any of our attempts, as teachers to manage interaction as if we were in sole charge, and their power is still there even if they choose, for the most part, not to use it. There are at least five different things that may access classroom’s success in general, those are: 1. Who gets to speak? 2. What do they talk about? 3. What does each participant do with the various opportunities to speak? 4. What sort of atmosphere is created? 5. What accent, dialect, or language is used? (Allwright and Bailey: 1991) If a student is particularly shy or anxious, teachers may have to work towards a generally more relaxed atmosphere before they can expect the student to be willing to speak in public. Given such complications it is hardly surprising that successful classroom interaction cannot be taken for granted, although simply using that language as the medium of instruction does not guarantee that the students get management opportunities, especially if the teacher is very controlling. Again, the teacher ‘language’, as we have seen has to interact with the student to implement any plans, and this inevitably means even most detailed and carefully worked out plans will give rise to slightly any subject. Talk is one of the major ways that teachers convey information to students, and it is also one of the primary means of controlling learner behavior. Usually, as teachers they do so much talking, it will be useful to ask what their talk is like. How this talk will give effect to the students’ point of view about the teacher? If you ask people about the languages they have learned, then you are likely to arouse memories of particular teacher-perhaps of the teacher who first captured their enthusiasm, or of the teacher who effectively killed it off. Even young children seem to identify school subjects strongly with the teachers who teach them, and sometimes find it very difficult to like a subject if they do not like the person who teaches the class. It would seem important and helpful, to most people, to be able to get on well with their teacher, to be open to the sort of person that he or she is. Although some teachers may infect practically all their students with their own enthusiasm, other teachers may succeed in ruining the experience for practically all theirs. The situation is further complicated by the possibility that students may disagree about their teacher, even within a given class, so that some learners feel unable to get on with a teacher who is clearly very well like by other students in the same class. A teacher may be liked as a person, and well respected as a professional, and yet not teach in a way that suits everybody in the class, to the extent that some students may find teacher quite useless to them. In Indonesia there is still many “classroom culture” where the teacher is the one who makes decision, and students must obey it. However, even this does not describe the whole power and status role, this kind of discourse tell us one small part of social language function in academic classrooms. These issues are still very much existed in our surrounding, and power and status are often restraint the purpose of communication. B. Literature review In general, people cooperate (and assume each other’s cooperation) in maintaining face in interaction, such cooperation being based on the mutual vulnerability of face. That is, normally everyone’s face depends on everyone else’s being maintained, and since people can be expected to defend their faces if threatened, and in defending their own to threaten other’s faces, it is in general in every participant’s best interest to maintain each other’s face, that is to act in ways that assure the other participants that the agent is heedful of the assumptions concerning face given under above.(Brown and Levinson,2005). In short, the content of face will differ in different cultures, and face will describe someone’s wants or intention, or people are familiar with facial gestures of speaker or hearer when they are doing communication. FTA (Face Threatening Acts) is a situation in which the speaker or hearer/addressee using facial gesture in accompanying their communication to impose or convince the other about his/her wants. These following factors might be resulted by FTA; 1. the social distance between speaker and hearer 2. the relative power of speaker and hearer 3. The absolute ranking of impositions in particular culture. Redressive action need not of course be verbal. If someone wants to satisfy someone else, he/she may indicate his understanding by bringing a gift or something that make the other pleasant. To show the humble action, people may show the still position or bow in particular culture, anyhow, people will use different strategies to send their “message “ to achieve their goals or wants. The nature of roles. When roles are compared, they are seen to have the following characteristics: 1. They involve different kinds of work and different levels of responsibility. 2. They involve different kinds of relationship and different patterns of interaction and communication. 3. They involve different power relationship. Some roles are defined primarily by the work people do. While others are mainly defined by the kind of interpersonal relationships they imply. While it might be assumed that the role of the teacher is primarily an occupational role, predetermined by the nature of schools and of teaching, teachers interpret their roles in different ways depending on the kinds of school in which they work, the teaching methods they employ, their individual personalities, and their cultural backgrounds. also, the teacher need to have interactional competence; knowing the etiquette of classroom interaction, knowing the rules for individual and collaborative work, knowing when to ask and answer questions, knowing how and when to get assistance or feedback in completing a task, and knowing appropriate rules for displaying knowledge.(Tikunoff,1985) One distinguishing feature of classroom language is that language is both the goal of the lesson and the means by which this goal is achieved.how teachers modify their language? The teacher has to get the students’ attention, monitor their understanding by constant checking, clarify, explain, define, and when appropriate summarise. Other strategies that can be done by teachers suggested by Chaudron 1988 are: 1. Speaking more slowly. 2. Using pause 3. Changing pronunciation 4. Modifying vocabulary 5. Modifying grammar, and 6. Modifying discourse C. Discussion 1. Data Collection and Analysis. The data of this paper is an advertisement of a washing soap (Rinso) which can be described as follows. The first scene is acts where a child (an elementary student) who study hard until late at night and unintentionally make his handkerchief dirty with several numbers because he just study mathematics. He was fall asleep in his chair. And his mother takes this handkerchief and then washes it secretly. Next in the morning, there is a mathematics examination, and in the scene, the teacher ( a woman) seems very strict and unfriendly, furthermore when she said “ 10 menit lagi”, all of the students looked very afraid and nervous, and the boy (the main actor of the ads) result many sweat and try to weep them using the handkerchief, but the teacher think that he must be want to be tricky or keeping the answer on the handkerchief, but in fact she was wrong, and the boy deliver a simple insulting smile for the teacher because of her miss prejudice. 2. Analysis The teacher’s character is a common description of teachers. Strict all the student to be fear, the only decision maker, and what is said is always true. The academic process in class in Indonesia is represented in the advertisement, especially in the examination. In the last minutes, teacher will tell the students how much time left, louder voice. Even though, if the teacher says the same thing in the flat tone, not louder, the effect will be the same. The students will be nervous and get hurry in doing the examination, because the announcement will be the warning for the students. In the ads, the teacher is a woman, and many people agree that the woman more strict than man. By setting negative face, or threatening face, the student will automatically do not make any move or sound because it can be interpreted as a forbidden. Even the teacher does not say that. Some meanings or interpretations of threatening acts; 1. order and request 2. suggestion and advice 3. reminding 4. threatening, warning, dares And these are directly damage positive face; 1. apologies 2. acceptance of a compliment 3. breakdown of physical control over body, badly leakage, stumbling or falling down 4. self humiliation, shuffling or cowering, acting stupid, self contradicting 5. confessions, admission of guilt or responsibility 6. emotion leakage; non control of laughter of tears The face that is set by the teacher indicate that she wants her students do the examination by themselves, do not cheat and make any unnecessary movement, her face more or less notice a sign to obey her and just do the examination. On the other hand, the students think that the examination is difficult, and he has limited time to do it, and it made him get perspired, and in case he use the handkerchief. He didn’t think about cheating or something else, but he just weep the sweat on his forehead when the teacher take the handkerchief, of course he was surprised- like all students, which is called or neared by the teacher- and suddenly he remembered that the night before he studied until late at night, and he thinks that the handkerchief might contain some notes about the examination and he was afraid to think that might be happened as the consequence. But his fear was not happened in real life. 3. Result From what have been seen in the advertisement the relationship between power and status in the advertisement reflects the relationship between teacher and students which is very clear that the status of teacher are stronger and students have no right to complain or argue because the teacher is the one who should be obeyed and she/he is always right. The description on the other hand will distract the relationship between teacher and student even indirectly if in one chance, the teacher makes mistake – anyhow, teacher is also a human – and if the mistake is associated with the lesson and it’s unsolved – the students will get wrong information. That means a disadvantage from this condition. For further relationship, it might be better if such kind of relationship has different form, that teacher and student is not about high and low position, but facilitator and trainee. This condition might be happened for any other kind of relationship, not just teacher and student. If power and status become a restrain of communication, there should be a different way of thinking between people who want to share the same purpose. They cannot delay or cancel what they want to talk about; even though the speaker and hearer have their own background. People should go back to the purpose of communication and then the communication can run well. The distinction between positive and negative politeness emphases not only marks class from class in hierarchical societies, but also marks different kinds of social roles from one to another. Thus we suspect that, in most cultures, women among women have a tendency to use more elaborated positive- politeness strategies than do men among men. But when they do get interaction with students, not as colleague but as teacher, they will play different role. D. Conclusion Relationship between people should be something that responsive and communicative. If a kind of relationship gives one side disadvantages there must be something missed in the relationship. Most people often do not tell their real intention just because they don’t want to be said impolite, not like other civilized people and prefer to pretend cooperative and permissive. The real is people should respect, understand and able to be cooperative whenever they are doing communication, no matter whomever the people that they talk to. Pragmatics is one kinds of means that help people how to cope with other in communication, how people deliver their wants and how people can response to these things, but the most important is how intention from ourselves and how we see the other from our point of view. Teacher, like another profession has responsibility and also consequences. Teaching is not an easy job, and can be very rewarding when we see our students’ progress and know that we have helped to make it happen. It is true that some lessons and students can be difficult and stressful at times, but it is also worth remembering that at its best teaching can also be extremely enjoyable. How teachers are should be? Students will always pay attention to what their teachers wear, say, and they do. But teacher like any other group of human beings, have individual differences. However, one of the things, perhaps, that the differentiates us from some other professions, is that we become different people, in a way, when we are in front of a class from the people we are in other situations, such as home or at a party. Everyone switches roles like this in their daily lives to some extent, but for teachers, who we are (or appear to be) when we are at work is especially important. Effective teacher personality is a blend between who we really are, and who we are as teachers. In other words, teaching is much more than just “being ourselves”, however much some students want to see the real person. We have to be able to present a professional face to the students which they find both interesting and effective. When we walk into the classroom, we want them to see someone who looks like a teacher whatever else they look like. This is not to suggest that we are in any way dishonest about who we are-teaching is not acting, after all-but we do think carefully about how we appear. An ideal teacher is also demanded to be able in absorb the unexpected events in the classroom and use it for students’ advantages . This is important when we take a look into the purposes of the study, and of course, the teacher can overcome whatever the condition of the students. Beside that, teacher is also need to adopt a number of roles in the class, depending on what the students are doing. Teacher should know that he/she can act as controller, prompter, and assessor. Anyhow, this flexibility will help teacher in facilitating the different stages and facets of learning. How students and teacher relation is important for creating atmosphere in the classroom, and also effect on how their teaching. in the best lessons we will always see a positive, enjoyable and respectful relationship, and it can be the result of the way we listen to and treat the students in our classrooms. Students are deserved to be listened, respected, and also recognized. They need to know that their teachers really care to them, and love them. They will feel that the one who can be counted on in school is the teacher. Another kind of performance from a teacher is about the task, academically and administratively. In teaching, teacher should prepare themselves well, because when we teaching we have to know what kind of achievement that should be gained by our students. Teacher need to keep the record also from what they teach, because it’s important for teacher to try to evaluate how successful an activity has been in term of students’ engagement and learning outcomes. Every teacher has their own classes, and how the class is managed depend o the teacher’s skill in doing so, he/she also need to matching task and group that such experiences clearly suggest is that we need to think carefully about matching activities and topics to the different groups we teach. That is why teacher has varies activities and topics over a period of time, for some teachers, students may suggest kind of activities that they want. Skill, task, rapport, personality are certain performance that should be fulfilled in describing good teacher, but knowledge of the teacher is also important for them. The more the knowledge they have the more various and subjects to be taught. Students have right to expect that teacher of the English language can explain straightforward grammar concepts, including how and when they are used. They expect their teachers to know the difference between the colloquial language that people use in informal conversation and the more formal language required in more formal settings. They also expect correctly and with appropriate intonation. Sometimes, the questions are easy, but sometimes are the opposite, and sometimes, irrelevant with what is being discussed in the lesson, but as a professional teacher, he/she should be able to handle such events in the classroom. Professional teacher should choose the right material and resources for their students, for example if teacher are using course book, students expect their teachers, of course to know how the material works. Their confidence will be greatly enhanced if they can see that the teacher has looked at the material they are using before the lesson, and has worked out a way of dealing with it. Equipment which is needed for teaching process, however, we should do everything in our power to avoid being overzealous about the equipment itself. References Allwright, Dick and Bailey Kathleen.1991.Focus on the Language Classroom: An Introduction to Classroom Research for Language Teachers.Cambridge University Press. John, Ann. M. 1997. Text, Role, and context. Cambridge University Press. Brown, Reaelope & Levinson, Stephen. 1978. Politeness, some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press. Chaudron,C.1988.Second Language Classroom:Research on Teaching and Learning.New York:Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. Nolan,James.2005.Interpretation:techniques and exercises.British Library Cataloguing Radford, Andrew & Friends. Linguistics; An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. Richard,Jack.1994.Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classroom.Cambridge Language Education.