The study of politeness in education setting interaction has increased in last decades. However, the investigation of politeness strategies in lecturer-student interaction using WhatsApp is relatively unexplored. Therefore, this study aims to explore politeness strategies used by a lecturer and students in virtual communication using WhatsApp during thesis consultation.  The researcher applied a mixed method: qualitative and quantitative research to discover the politeness phenomena in WhatsApp interaction. The participants of the study were 10 undergraduate students of English Department, University of HKBP Nommensen, and a lecturer as their thesis consultant. The data of the study consist of 50 screenshots of WhatsApp chats  thesis consultation. The results show that all four types of politeness strategies were found in lecture-students interaction. The politeness strategies used by the lecturer and students differ greatly. The lecturer dominantly employed bald on-record (30. 93%) with the most imperative sentences realization; on the other hand, the students tend to use positive politeness strategy (23.20%) with the most greetings realization. This demonstrates that lecturers keep their distance when communicating, whereas students attempt to “get closer” during the interaction. The different politeness strategy choices are caused by the different power and social status (position) factors between lecturers and students. The findings of this study also show that the politeness strategies chosen by lecturers and students are not always consistent with previous similar studies.

This research aims to explore error analysis in students’ academic writing. The study was conducted at the University of HKBP Nommensen Medan. The method used is a mixed-method. The research participants were 26 English department students in the third semester. Thus, the research data consist of 26 narrative stories. The results showed that around 252 errors were found in all categories. The most dominant error category is omission 92 (36.51%) then is respectively followed by addition 64 (25.40%), misinformation 56 (22.22%), and disordering 40 (15.87%). The most dominant factor as the cause of the error is first language interference, and then translation and carelessness. In conclusion, all types of errors (omission, addition, misinformation, and disordering) were identified in the students’ narrative writing. Keywords: Error Analysis, Factor of Errors, Narrative Writing, University Students

Over the last decade, research on the quality of EFL students' English academic writing has increased. However, research on EFL students' academic writing that incorporates grammatical metaphors is regarded scarce. As such, this study seeks to elucidate the occurrences of ideational metaphors in students' academic writing essays. The qualitative descriptive method was used in this study. This research involved a total of 25 undergraduate students from the University of HKBP Nommensen Medan, Indonesia, English Department, Faculty of Language and Arts, who studied Academic Writing course in the third semester. Students were required to submit a 350-word essay on the subject "Learning Challenges during the Coronavirus Pandemic." The research's data corpus totals 10,252 words. The results indicate that the students' writings contain 281 clauses comprising the ideational metaphor. It is deemed little in comparison to the corpus's overall data set of 10,252 words. Material processes dominate the incidence of ideational metaphors, followed by mental processes, relational processes, behavioral processes, and existential processes. This finding implies that the essay structure of EFL students is unlikely to have a large proportion of solid grammatical metaphor clauses. The pedagogical implication of this research is that EFL students, lecturers, teachers, and other educational practitioners interested in teaching English academic writing should be aware of grammatical metaphors in writing texts as a proxy for the quality of scientifically academic writing.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) refers to some kind of text analysis, including an analysis of literary language. Some research has verified the study of the literary text using this linguistic apparatus; however the use of SFL in literary text analysis is relatively rare. Therefore, this study investigated the contributions of SFL to literary text analysis. The data of the study were 20 scientific articles focusing on literary text analysis using SFL. The analysis used content analysis to expose the segments of the story analyzed and the components of SFL to analyze them. The findings showed that the method of analysis using SFL on the literary text has brought new perspectives to the researchers, and provided some possible future studies in literary works. Moreover, the study of literary texts is regarded not merely as interpretative practices but as explanatory categories for each segment of a literary text.

Since the outbreak of Coronavirus in 2020, teaching and studying activities commonly conducted in the classrooms were shifted to online, which caused students to adapt and accept without compromising. This study analyzed the dialogue texts expressing students' hopes and views about the future of learning amidst the Covid-19 pandemic written by the Senior High School students of Nanyang Zhi Hui school in Medan, Sumatera Utara. The objectives are to analyze the mood, modality, and modality orientation types; and figure out the dominantly-applied mood, modality, and orientation types in the dialogue texts. This descriptive qualitative research applied the Mood and Modality theory by Halliday and other linguists. The study revealed that 1) three mood types: declarative, interrogative, and imperative, four types of modality: probability, usuality, obligation, and inclination range from low, median, and high degrees; four orientations: subjective-explicit, subjective-implicit, objective-explicit, and objective-implicit occurred in the texts; and 2) the clauses are represented through the extensive use of declarative mood (80,74%), median probability (47%), and implicitly objective modality orientation (45,15%). The study concludes that the students tend to give their insights using statements with median probability and orientation of objective-implicit in the dialogue, which shows a lack of confidence in the utterances.