Freedom Writers Movie Analysis

1796 Words8 Pages

Title : The Switch of Speech Style Used by Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers Movie
1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study
Language is more than just a tool for communication that helps the speaker to deliver the information to the listener, but rather as an important key feature on leading people (Baxter, 2010). In the education context, teachers are considered as leaders who “place their students’ learning as their primary goal and work within their own classrooms to improve student achievement” (Merideth, 2007, p. 3). As a leader in the language classroom, the teacher’s language product holds a very important role in the achievement of the students (Diaz, Lynne T. and Rico, 2004, p. 293). Language product used by the teacher is influenced …show more content…

Even though many studies have discussed this movie from many different perspectives, this movie still has a lot of things to discuss. The writer chooses to focus on the speech styles used by the teacher in using the theory on the gendered speech style conducted by Judith Baxter in 2010 that shows the differences between male speech styles and female speech styles including its features. The writer wants to know whether it is possible or not if a female teacher uses male speech style in the class and the effects on the class’ contexts on the choice of teacher’s speech style. In this study, the writer divides the analysis into two parts because in the movie Erin Gruwell changes her teaching style after realizing the racial issue happened in her class are getting worse. She realizes it after the war between different races happened in the school. Therefore, the writer decides to divides the analysis into two significant periods happened in the …show more content…

• What are the similarities and differences of the features used by the teacher over the two main periods of the Freedom Writers movie ?
1.3 Purpose of the Study
In conducting this analysis, the writer would like to find out the answers of the problems stated in the research questions. This analysis is intended to find out what features of male and female speech styles that are used by the teacher in the movie. In addition, the writer wants to fulfill her curiosity about how significant the teacher switches her speech styles in the two main periods on the movie.
1.4 Significance of the Study
By doing this analysis, the writer hopes that the findings would be very beneficial for teachers to evaluate the speech styles that they have been using. Furthermore, hopefully, this study could help teachers to improve their speech styles used in the classroom. On the other words, teachers will be aware of the importance of adjusting the speech styles to the target learner needs. Besides, the findings of this study can help the teachers to be able to understand how to use male speech styles and female speech styles in the classroom to motivate their