EXPRESSING EVALUATION OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN PERSUASIVE TEXT OF NON-ENGLISH NATIVE STUDENTS

Abstract

Persuasive text is a genre aiming to convince its reader to agree with the author’s opinion and to comply with the author’s request. One characteristic of the persuasive text is that the author delivers his/her feelings and evaluation of things or of other people. What things or persons she/he evaluates and the way he/she expresses evaluation influence the success of his/her persuasion. Nowadays, world society live in the COVID-19 pandemic era. Various responses related to the pandemic are expressed through written discourse, including the discourse produced by the students of English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Diponegoro University. In their writing class, they wrote persuasive text about urge to stop the spread of COVID-19. This research explores the way non-English native students express their feelings on COVID-19 and the way they evaluate things and other people related to COVID-19 pandemic in their persuasive texts. Appraisal theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics is used to analyze how the author employed evaluative language for their writings. Texts produced by 18 students of English Department were taken as the data sampling. This is descriptive-qualitative research employing corpus linguistics method. The chosen corpus processing tool was LancsBox 5.1.2 One of several features in LancsBox used in this study is Concordance which helps to see a certain query item in wider context. The findings show that; 1) Wearing mask, washing hands, and staying at home are evaluated positively realized through adjective ‘effective’; 2) The government behaviour are assessed in positive way in verbs and adverbs. Furthermore, the discussion explains how some adjectives, verbs, and adverbs which are neutral might have either negative or positive attitude if they occur in certain environments.