A STUDY OF ASSERTIVENESS IN A DEBATE SETTING

This article reports a study on the analysis of assertiveness of students argument in a private senior high school debating s club. This study aims to identify the level of assertiveness of arguments in debating. The study employed mainly a qualitative method focusing on text analysis and involved a debating activity of senior high school students. World School Debating Championship style, Hallidayan s mood and modality analysis, and the theory of assertiveness in verbal communication became the basis of the analysis. seven phenomena were analyzed in this study including mood type, mood adjunct (conjunctive adjunct), mood metaphor, modality type, modality value, orientation and manifestation of modality, and modality metaphor. This study reveals that the level of assertiveness in argumentation is measured through the total number of declarative mood, conjunctive adjunct, high value of modality, explicit subjective modality, and explicit subjective modality metaphor. The study also shows that the level of assertiveness relatively depends on how the students deliver their arguments. Therefore, the students might need a variety of ways in order to make their argument sound more assertive.