ANALYSIS OF IMPOLITENESS STRATEGIES USED BY ENGLISH TEACHERS AT PRIMARY LEVEL AND IMPACT ON DROPOUT RATE OF STUDENTS IN KPK

Abstract

Politeness is the most important aspect of classroom and its environment. Impoliteness can create disturbance and unfriendly circumstances in the classroom for the students and teachers as well. This research focus on identifying the impoliteness strategies used by the English teachers in the classroom at primary level in KPK public schools. The research also explores the impact of impoliteness strategies on the students and rise in the drop out rate due to the behavior of the teacher. The researchers have used mixed method of both the qualitative approach and quantitative approach for the data collection which involves almost 20 teachers for observation and 10 for random interviews. Similarly, 10 students have been interviewed who were dropped out from different districts of KPK like Peshawar, Nowshera and Mardan. Data has been collected through observation and recording the lectures in the classroom. The main types of analysis used in the research were discourse analysis for classroom observation, thematic analysis was used for teachers’ and descriptive analysis were used for students’ interviews. The model of Jonathan Culpeper’s (2005) was applied on the collected data. The research explored that there was a lot more impolite teachers in the selected and limited location. most of the teachers used positive and negative impoliteness which resulted into the drop out of the students. On the other hand, drop out students have been interviewed who cited a major reason for the drop out was harsh behavior of the teacher. As a result, the study concludes that teacher must use polite behavior in the class and they must be kind to the students. So, the environment of the class could be friendly. The current research recommends the training of those teachers who use such practices as well as new teachers to avoid harsh and impolite behavior in the class specifically at primary level in KPK.