A Pragmatic Analysis Of Emergent Leaders In Leaderless Group Discussion
Abstract
Group discussion has been found to have significant roles in establishing students'
collaborative skills. One of the skills is leadership. To establish leadership skills during group
discussion, previous research found that leaderless group discussion tends to suggest that
gender was a contributing factor to identify the students who emerged as a leader. Anchored
to the leaderless group discussion theory by (Ensari et. al. 2011). To extend this issue in EFL
context, especially in Indonesia, this research aims to elaborate the emergence of leadership
attitude by higher education students during leaderless group discussion. Two recordings of
online synchronous leaderless group discussion were collected as the data. To analyze the
data, we used Speech Acts of Request and Big Five Theory of leadership attitude. This
research found that female student emerged as the leader and the male students acted to be
the supporting group members. The female students lead the group discussion by performing
feminine leadership attitudes such as extraversion, intelligence and authoritarianism. These
attitudes were manifested through the speech acts of request such as conventionally indirect
(query) and direct act of request (suggestory). These findings denied the stigma that only the
male gender with authoritarianism is more likely to emerge during leaderless group
discussion, as for females were able to emerge by relying on not just authoritarianism but also
extraversion and intelligence behind that.