The Use of Cooperative Principle in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Children at Eddy‟s English Centre, Jember

Abstract

In daily communication, people sometimes fail to understand what others mean, and this leads to confusion or misunderstanding between the two parties. However, there is a way to avoid this confusion or misunderstanding that may occur during the conversation, which is described by Grice as Cooperative Principle with four conversational maxims. Considering the phenomenon above, this thesis analyzes the use of Cooperative Principle in an English teaching classroom, in which the students are children of 10-15 years old. A qualitative research is conducted as the method to analyze the sentences that either follow or break the conversational maxims, while the field research type is used to collect the data by recording five of 24 meetings at Eddy‟s English Centre. There are two main focuses of this thesis. First is the discussion of how the communication between the teacher and the students go during the teaching process, and the second focus is on what impacts the use of Cooperative Principle contributes to the English teaching process. The writer begins the discussion by elaborating types of conversational maxims that are used in the English classroom, and as the follow-up elaboration, explores the impacts that the Cooperative Principle brings to the teaching process itself. To support the argumentation, some sentences are presented in the discussion as proofs that the use of Cooperative Principle occurs during the conversation between the teacher and the student. The result of the discussion proves that the use of conversational maxims by the teacher influences the understanding of the students about the material given in the class. When the teacher violates the maxim, for example, the students fail to see what the teacher mean.