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.