Murni Mahmud
This paper explores the expressions employed by English students in managing their respect in their conversation in social media, in this case the WhatsApp chats. This paper was based on the descriptive-qualitative study conducted at Universitas Negeri Makassar in 2018. The subject of this research is the English students of the Graduate Program of Universitas Negeri Makassar. To collect data, the chats of the English students in WhatsApp when communicating to each other were collected and transcribed. Politeness strategies of the English students were explored and discussed in relation to the “face-saving view” of Brown and Levinson (1987). Findings show that English students applied several strategies in expressing politeness in the ways they were asking questions, requesting, and refusing. The strategies can be seen in the forms of greetings, thanks, apologies, some identity markers, such as the use of address terms and some terms from the students' regional language. In addition, the students applied humor and small talk as the ways to be polite. Those strategies were used each other to support their politeness expressions in order to create good conversations. Findings from this study become a reference for study of politeness in a different context of speech situation. This study shows that although English students were subject to high technology of online communication, some strategies to show respect are still applied for the sake of good interaction and mutual understanding. © 2020 Asian E F L Journal Press. All rights reserved.
Universitas Negeri Makassar, Indonesia
