Investigating the Features of Spoken English Grammar Found in Classroom Discussion

This research was conducted to analyze and find out the features of spoken English grammar, the features of spoken English grammar that mostly used and how the occurrence of the features of spoken English grammar in the classroom discussion. This research was classified into descriptive qualitative research. The data of this research were the utterances of spoken English grammar uttered by the students during the classroom discussion. The source of data was the students of English graduate program in the first semester of the State University of Padang who took a subject by applying discussion in the teaching and learning process. The data were collected through video recording and observation sheet. There were five video recordings. The finding shows that from the five data recordings, it was found all of the features of spoken English grammar in the students’ utterances in the classroom discussion. Then, the features that commonly used by the students from the five data recordings were modal expression (Maybe, can, I think, should, have to, could, may, possible, need to, must, and I don’t know) 130 times, vague language (about, like, can be called, they called, how do we call this? what we called, and something like that) 120 times, deixis (now, then and here) 102 times, spoken clause structure (and and so) 74 times, ellipsis (omission of subject and verb) 23 times, and head and tail (reinforcement and interrogative) 23 times. Furthermore, the occurrence of the features of spoken English grammar was influenced by the characteristics of the spoken English grammar itself. In conclusion, all of the features of the spoken English grammar used by the students of English graduate program in their utterances in the classroom discussion and modal expression was the most frequent features.