Violation of Grice's Maxims in teacher talk

Teacher talk is important for the teaching-learning activity in the classroom. One of the most important roles of teacher talk is to make the students easily understand the teacher’s idea. To make the teacher talk is easy to be understood by the students, it is important for the teacher to follow the Grice’s Maxims to provide informative, clear and relevant information to the students. However, teacher will not always obey Grice’s Maxims. Teacher may disobey the Grice’s Maxim which also known as violation of Grice’s Maxims. This study aims to investigate teacher talk which is violated Grice’s Maxim along with her reason towards the violation. The students also give some reasons of not focusing while the conversation violated and some input to improve her teaching. There are four maxims that identified in this study, maxim of quality, maxim of quantity, maxim of relevance and maxim of manner. This study could be important for teachers to improve their language use in the classroom. This qualitative study analyzed the teacher talk of four meetings of Reading A class in a private university in Surabaya. The data were identified using Grice’s Maxim. The data were put in the table that contains the lecturer’s utterances and four maxims analyzed in this study. After the analysis of the data, it was found that the teacher still did the violation in the classroom. Maxim which is mostly violated is maxim of manner, especially redundancy. The reason is the teacher kept repeating students’ answers that became one of her methods to correct the students’ answers and to re-check whether the answers were the ones that they meant. The violation also affected the students understanding and also interest in doing the conversation. On the other hand, the student gave a valuable input to simplify the explanation so that it will be easier for the students to understand.