Teacher Encouraging Discourse in the Film Freedom Writers

Teacher Encouraging Discourse in the Film Freedom Writers
Josefa J. Mardijono
Petra Christian University

Teachers play an important role in the classroom interaction, both through the transactional and interactional discourse. Through teachers’ interactional discourse, students may be assisted to have their self-esteem and self-confidence enhanced and promoted. In this way they can be empowered to be better, as it is shown in the film Freedom Writer, a biographic gender, based on the book entitled “Freedom Writers”. It revealed how the teacher, Erin Gruwell, managed to empower a group of 150 students, labeled to be “untouchable”, to finally get graduated.
This paper is related to the teacher discourse used in the film, focusing on the discourse containing encouraging words, with the purpose to reveal the illocutionary acts of those encouraging utterances, and the perlocutionary effects viewed from the students’ responses to the utterances. The theories employed consisted of speech acts and responding acts. The source of data was ten classroom scenes of the film Freedom Writers the data comprised those utterances containing encouraging words, and the students’ responses to those utterances. The findings revealed that the teacher’s illocutionary acts performed through the encouraging utterances comprised mostly representatives followed by directives. The other minor types were expressive and commissives. The responses elicited all belonged to the preferred type or positive responding acts, which indicated that they fulfilled the teacher’s communicative intention to lead them towards a better future for themselves. By having their self-esteem enhanced and their self-confidence promoted, they opened themselves to let the teacher lead them towards the process of empowerment.
What Erin Gruwell did through her positive encouraging words could be an inspiration for teachers that they can do something more than just teaching to achieve the academic goals, leading the students towards better personal development.