Realization of Assertive Speech Acts Performed By The National University Debating Championship Grand Final 2020

____________________ Abstract ___________________________________________________________________ This study was focused on evaluating the realization of the assertive speech acts performed by the government and opposition teams in the NUDC Grand Final 2020. The analysis included the analysis of assertive speech acts, the comparison between the assertive speech act performed by both teams, and the pedagogical implication toward English education. The results of the study showed that twelve types of assertive speech acts were found in their utterances during their speech, such as asserting, arguing, informing, claiming, predicting, suggesting, stating, criticizing, rebutting, reminding, complaining, and reporting assertive speech act in which stating assertive speech act had achieved significant used during the government teams’ speeches . Meanwhile, arguing and criticizing assertive speech act almost reached the highest number of altogether just slightly below stating assertive speech act which confirmed that aside from the declarative statements employed within the arguments, the opposition team was revealed to show their strong disagreement toward the government team’s arguments. Moreover, the


INTRODUCTION
Language as verbal communication consists of a package of meaning that cannot be separated from the speaker's intention and the hearer's recognition as they both interchangeable relationships. To reach an understanding between the sender and recipient of information, one needs to concern about the purpose of speech communicated by a speaker. A statement means a process of making word sounds to impart knowledge. Some utterances contain meaning more than what is uttered that goes beyond its literal meanings (Kohar, 2018;Susanti, Sumarlam, & Djatmika, 2020;and Husain, Hamamah, & Nurhayani, 2020). Therefore, when someone communicates something to us, our focus is not primarily on the sentences, yet the intention behind their utterances should be taken into accounts. Thus, the meaning behind the utterances might possess the fundamental objectives that should be understood by the hearers regardless of the literal meaning of utterances. Therefore, language use in communication is considered essential in presenting the speaker's stances.
To deal with the use of language in conversation, pragmatics needs to be applied. Pragmatics, a branch of linguistics studies, explores the relationship between the context outside the language and the meaning of speech depends on speakers, receivers, and other features of the context of speech and focuses on implied meanings. When expressing the statements, at the same time, the speaker performs particular kinds of activities (Mubais & Sofwan, 2018). Each speaker has the intention behind their utterances. For example, "the coffee tastes great" this sentence might be to invite, to offer a cup of coffee to the hearer, or merely a statement of fact. Thus, the hearer must interpret it well by considering the context surrounding the conversation to keep one away from a misunderstanding at the time of communication (Sari, 2020).
The terms such as locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act are familiar in speech acts. When people produce utterances, unconsciously, they have produced three related acts deal with their statements. The locutionary act is to display words into sentences that make sense in a language with correct grammar and pronunciation. It is what a person does in saying something else. At the same time, the perlocutionary act is the impact that an expression has on the audience's considerations, sentiments, or perspectives.
Speech acts are often meant to refer to just the same thing as the term of illocutionary act. When words are actions, or it is doing something else, something more powerful, this is known as speech acts. Speech acts perform five general functions: assertive, commissive, expressions, directives, and declarative. First, the assertive speech act focuses on the speaker's commitment to the truth of the expressed proposition, which must have propositional content, evidence, or reasons for the reality of the plan expressed. In simple words, It states what the speaker believes to be the case or not. It is in the form of explaining, suggesting, predicting, warning, reporting, repeating, and so on, all of which describe the state as being a certain way. Second, the commissive speech act is the speech act in which the speaker commits to express their intention in a future action such as a promise, a swear, a threat, a guarantee, a refusal, etc. The commissive speech act is used based on the aim of speakers to the hearer. The third is the expressive speech act. Third, expressive speech acts. Speech acts in which the speaker expresses an attitude against a situation by using verbs such as apologizing, appreciating, congratulating, regretting, hating, regretting, thanking, welcoming, etc. Fourth, directive speech acts, where the speaker tries to make the speech partner do something, with words such as asking, pleading, challenging, ordering, challenging, inviting, urging, asking, etc. Last is the declarative speech act, in which the speaker aims to change the world via utterances.
The debate has a relationship with the speech act theory. If people debate a topic, they discuss it from two opposing sides. It means a discussion related to the arguable acts, which are a part of assertive speech acts. Those who agree with the specified motion, statement, or idea are on the "Pro" side. Those who will not agree with the specified actions, comments, or opinions are the "Cons" party. Each team will show in an organized and intelligent way why they believe they have the correct answer. They will utilize models and proof to help their thoughts while running after an end.
More broadly, a debate is an important tool for developing and maintaining democracy and an open society. More than just verbal or performance skills, discussion embodies the ideals of reasoned argument, tolerance for different points of view, and rigorous selfexamination. Debate is, above all, a way for those with opposing views to discuss controversial issues without descending into contempt, emotional appeal, or personal bias.
A study on assertive speech act in the debate is needed to see how debaters in the two opposing sides try to make the listener either following or believing their statement and how the listener responds to the speaker. In this research, a comparison study is necessary to compare the two things. They are the assertive speech acts used by the government and opposition team in the debate. Thus, I am interested in conducting research dealing with assertive speech acts entitled, "A comparison between government and opposition teams' assertive speech acts in the grand finale of National University Debating Championship 2020 performed by Universitas Tadolako,  Universitas Parahyangan, Universitas Gadjahmada, and Universitas Tanjungpura.
This study was carried out in order to give deep understanding about how the implementation of speech acts carry the communicative purposes. Although there have been some studies related to the ways speech acts were implemented in communication, the online communication becomes the particular interest as the new phenomena when people are communicating through online medium. Therefore, this study was expected to give more reference in online communication regarding to the implementation of speech acts.

METHODS
The design of this study was a descriptive qualitative study that aimed to scrutinize the realization of assertive speech acts during the debate. This study was focused on evaluating the realization of the assertive speech act performed by the government and opposition team in the NUDC Grand Final 2020. The analysis included the analysis of assertive speech acts, the comparison between the assertive speech act performed by both teams, and the pedagogical implication toward English education.
This study focused on analyzing assertive speech acts within the utterances produced by the debater team members in the National University Debating Championship (NUDC) Grand Final 2020 that was conducted virtually through Zoom meeting due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis was based on the spoken discourse analysis in which the utterances were scrutinized according to Schifrin (1994), in which the assertive speech acts were produced. The assertive speech acts within the utterances were also scrutinized based on the theory proposed by Searle and Vanderveken (1985).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This study focused on analyzing assertive speech acts within the utterances produced by the debater team members in the National University Debating Championship (NUDC) Grand Final 2020 that was conducted virtually through Zoom meeting due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis was based on the spoken discourse analysis in which the utterances were scrutinized in which the assertive speech acts were produced. The assertive speech acts within the utterances were also scrutinized based on the theory proposed by Searle andVanderveken (1985, as cited in Cutting, 2002). Twelve types of speech acts were categorized and how the speech acts have functioned in the speakers' utterances. The analysis was also comparing the assertive speech acts performed by two sides of the teams: the government and opposition team, to criticize how the utterances and the speech acts differed from the other.  Figure 1, it could be seen that there were a variety of assertive speech acts performed by the two teams who were debating in the National University Debating Championship 2020 Grand Final in which 12 assertive speech acts were utilized during the debate with total occurrences of 437 assertive speech acts, except disclaiming and admitting assertive speech act. According to Figure 1, the assertive speech act was dominated by stating assertive speech acts with 95 utterances employed by the debaters in expressing their arguments. This finding indicated that most of the utterances were expressed clearly and carefully by the debate team members. It also represented that the speakers were confident with the points they delivered during the debate. Furthermore, the admitting and disclaiming assertive speech act were never found to be employed during the debate. All speakers from the two teams never supported the arguments that the opposite team had delivered. This finding indicated that all speakers were well-aware of the case being debated and had adequate knowledge to discuss the topic given in the debate. In addition, it was also found out that criticizing and arguing speech acts shared almost the same number of occurrences, around 80 speech acts. This represented that the critics toward one another's arguments were commonly produced during the debate, and the arguments supporting the ideas were successfully also elaborated to encounter against opponent's ideas.
Moreover, other assertive speech acts were significantly employed during the debate, such as asserting and predicting compared to the others with around 46 and 38 occurrences. This finding also confirmed that the debate speakers successfully presented ideas for or against each other by either strong statements and projections to support the idea. In addition, the asserting type of assertive speech act that was found to frequently occur during the debate indicated that some utterances were declared positively and strongly to the audience and opposite team to make them share the same point of view toward the discussion. Meanwhile, the figure also presented some assertive speech acts that the speaker hardly utilized with below ten occurrences: reporting, claiming, and reminding assertive speech acts. Those assertive speech act total occurrences illustrated that providing reports, making claims, and reminding past events/facts were categorized as peripheral elements in providing support to the arguments.

Assertive Speech Acts Performed by the Government Team
Based on the analysis, various types of speech acts performed by the government team in the National University Debating Championship (NUDC) Grand Final 2020 were conducted online through zoom meetings. The result could be seen as follows: Based on Figure 2, the assertive speech acts performed by the government team consisted of 211 utterances in which the stating speech act dominated the assertive speech acts with a total of 47 occurrences out of 211 total utterances. The stating speech acts performed by the government team indicated that the government team declared their points clearly to the audience and the opposition team in convincing ways, assuming that the points and arguments were good to be true. In addition, the criticizing and arguing assertive speech act was also shown to occur frequently with almost 40 occurrences during the government turns, which reflected that the government team supplied criticism against the opposition's arguments within their speaking. The arguing speech act had also reinforced the criticism by conveying logical reasons to strengthen the quality of the critics. Similar to the general findings of this study, the asserting and predicting speech acts were found to be recurrently employed by the government speaker during their turn of speaking with 29 and 23 occurrences correspondingly. Those findings implied that the government speakers possessed strong beliefs about the arguments they had delivered; In contrast, the government speakers were also shown to be imaginative in mentioning future predictions to support their arguments. Meanwhile, there was no proof that the government team was using disclaiming and admitting assertive speech acts indicating that the team had already prepared enough information and knowledge related to the case being debated and did not support the opposition team's arguments.

Assertive Speech Acts Performed by the Opposition Team
The result of assertive speech acts performed by opposition team could be seen in the following figure.   Figure 3, the assertive speech act performed by the opposition team was dominated mainly by the stating speech act, which reached 48 occurrences during the opposition speaking turns. This represented that the argument delivered by the opposition team was wrapped clearly and understandable for the audience. Likewise, this stating speech act was almost followed by arguing and criticizing assertive speech act which also utilized by opposition speakers with more than 40 occurrences. This also confirmed that the ways the opposition speakers produced criticism toward something during the debate were well-adjusted by delivering the arguments. Meanwhile, the other assertive speech acts were fairly produced during the opposition speaking turns, such as asserting, informing, predicting, suggesting, and rebutting with almost 20 manifestations. This indicated that the opposition team also had to provide other assertive speech acts other than criticizing and arguing to create well-established arguments and strengthen the essence of the arguments. There were also least some assertive speech acts that were employed opposition team during their speaking turn, namely claiming, reminding, complaining, and reporting with attained below five occurrences. This finding also confirmed that although the occurrences only happened few times, the other assertive speech act also possessed roles to sustain the arguments. Moreover, there was no proof that the opposition team had utilized disclaiming and admitting assertive speech acts, which meant the arguments provided by the opposition team were never found to be weakly expressed and never gave any acknowledgment toward the government's arguments.

Similarities and Differences between Assertive Speech Acts Performed by the Government Team and Opposition Team
As the debate was based on the British Parliamentary style in which two teams were arguing with one another, this study also uncovered the similarities between the use of assertive speech acts performed by both teams. Since both the proposition team and opposition team share the same motion to be discussed, the similarities in producing assertive speech acts could be identified. The findings related to the similarities of assertive speech acts performed by the government and opposition team could be seen in the following figure.   Figure 4, it could be seen that there were only two similarities related to the frequency of assertive speech acts performed by both the government team and the opposition team. The admitting and disclaiming assertive speech act was never found to be utilized by both teams during the debate. Meanwhile, the distribution of the other assertive speech acts was seen to be unequally produced either by the government team and the opposition team, which sometimes higher and sometimes lower from another team.
Overall, the assertive speech act performed by the opposition team was higher than the government team, with total occurrences 226 and 211 correspondingly. Some assertive speech acts that were significantly different in the distribution in which the government team possessed higher employment of assertive speech act were asserting, predicting, reminding, and complaining assertive speech act compared to as performed by the opposition team. The greater number of asserting assertive speech act carried out by the government team indicated that they managed to produce a statement that was strongly believed by them and strongly declared to the audience to influence the audience in viewing the motion they proposed. In addition, the higher number of predicting assertive speech act use had represented that the government team utilized more rhetorical explanation by projecting something in the future to support the motion they were proposing. Those rhetorical projections contained logical consequence which might convince the audience about how things were going to happen. Concerning reminding assertive speech act that was shown to be significantly utilized by the government team, the government team had already strengthened the arguments by recalling the last events closely related to the motion being discussed. The more reminding assertive speech act was performed, the more relatable arguments to the real context also emphasized the relevance of the actual phenomena. Concerning the higher number of complaining assertive speech acts performed by the government team, it represented that the government team found more flaws within the opposition team's arguments which were assumed to weaken the arguments delivered by the opposition team. This also showed that the government team was also considered to be critical in responding to the opposition arguments.

Implication of Government and Opposition
Team's Assertive Speech Acts in the National University Debating Championship (NUDC) in English Education The speakers' manifestation of assertive speech act during the debate represented that all speakers had successfully performed well in utilizing their communicative skills as the debate needs reading the information, listening to what the speaker said, delivering the arguments, and writing important points from the other speaker's arguments. Thus, the findings possessed some pedagogical implications for language learners, especially in English education. The use of assertive speech acts such as asserting and stating done by government and opposition team within the debate contained essential implications for English learners in providing a statement that is strong and clearly and carefully as it could give extraordinary impression toward the audience to share the same feeling that the statement is true. By asserting and stating assertive speech acts, the English learners could also learn the structure of asserting and stating assertive speech acts, which could strongly believe in the motion being discussed.
Concerning the realization of arguing performed by the government and opposition team in the debate, the findings gave an insight on how to create well-composed arguments according to the correct structure as it could convince the audience that the arguments are based on the real world and logical ways of thinking. Moreover, the rebutting assertive speech act could be a reference for English learners about how to disapprove the arguments from other people based on meticulous analysis as it could influence the audience that the contradict statement could be true. Therefore, the arguing and rebutting assertive speech act educates the English learners in establishing arguments and disapproving the arguments.
Related to criticizing, complaining, and suggesting assertive speech act that the government and opposition team realized during the debate, the English learners are trained to be critical toward arguments produced by other people. In criticizing the assertive speech act, the English learners are taught how to create critics against other people's arguments in a correct procedure, such as analyzing other people's arguments, writing down the key points as critics, and developing the critical statement. Furthermore, the English learners could compose critical statements based on the right ways. It also convinces the audience that the critical statement is logical and true in finding faults from other people's arguments. Related to complaining assertive speech act, the English learners could imitate the debaters to make complaints related to flaws found within other people's arguments. This also educates the English learners about bravely showing other people that something is wrong with the statement they have produced. Similarly, suggesting assertive speech acts as a crucial reference to complete the weakness within the other people's arguments. Although other people might not directly accept the suggestion, at least it has already revealed that there is an imperfection in other people's arguments. Therefore, the criticizing, complaining and suggesting assertive speech act can generally be utilized by English learners to become critical in scrutinizing something and not taking something for granted.
Dealing with reminding, reporting, and informing assertive speech act utilized by government and opposition team during the debate, the students are exposed to how to strengthen the arguments by recalling certain facts that are closely related to the motion. The arguments would be considered logical and applicable as the lesson is learned from the past by recalling the last facts. Thus, it also brings forth examples in enforcing the unquestionable arguments due to its real-world experience. Furthermore, reporting assertive speech act within the debate had served as a recommendation to clarify the arguments as it elaborates the arguments with factual discovery. The English learners could expand their arguments by involving finding research to persuade the audience that the arguments were closely related to the research that has been proven before. Meanwhile, informing assertive speech act that was found to be meant to explain certain conceptual statements helps the English learners to communicate new knowledge to other people based on the appropriate structure so that it could be well received and easy to be understood by the audience. Therefore, English students have to be able to perform reminding, reporting, and informing assertive speech act so that their arguments are strong and convince the audience that the ideas are logical, applicable, and based on valid research.
Regarding claiming and predicting assertive speech act done by the government and opposition team during the debate, English students could utilize claiming assertive speech act to attract the audience that a statement is true when something is claimed. The claiming assertive speech act also indirectly demands the audience to accept the claim, although no proof has been revealed. Meanwhile, predicting assertive speech act helps the students be more imaginative in utilizing their logical thinking to provide projection that could be assumed to be true by the audience. Once the prediction is well constructed, it also could lead to a belief possessed by the audience that the prediction might likely be unquestionably true. Therefore, the claiming and predicting assertive speech act provides an insight to the English learners to be creative and appealing in composing arguments to the audience.
As people communicate to each other by producing utterances, speech acts are essentially performed. The assertive speech act is categorized as one of the speech act categories that communicate information to others (Yule, 1996). Assertive speech acts bind the speaker to the truth of the proposition expressed. It has a truth-value, shows words to world fit, and represents the speaker's belief toward something (Cruse, 2000). The speaker can state the punishment based on the factor that gives his or her own opinion about a condition. It can be his or her subjective opinion. Furthermore, the realization of the assertive speech act possessed different functions that depend on the context and structure of the utterances and the context underpinning the utterances. As the assertive speech act mostly deals with communicating the information, this study analyzed the realization of the assertive speech act performed by two teams clashing their arguments during the NUDC Grand Final 2020 debate competition in which the event was conducted online through zoom meeting. During the British Parliamentary Style debate, two teams are arguing one another in which one side proposes the motion while another side against the motion of the debate. Hence, analyzing the assertive speech acts carried out by both teams would reveal the characteristics of assertive speech acts as performed by a different group of people with a different point of view. Therefore, the realization of assertive speech acts performed by the government and opposition team depends on their purpose in the first place (Josiah & Johnson, 2012).
Regarding the realization of assertive speech acts performed by the government team, the significant use of stating assertive speech acts proved that most of the utterances operated as a declaration about something clearly as the speakers shared their beliefs to the audience. Ramadhani, Indrayani & Soemantri (2019) statement of facts that the speaker believes to be true could convince the audience to believe the same thing. Likewise, criticizing and arguing assertive were discovered to be notably utilized by the government team, representing that aside from declaration statement, the government teams were found to employed criticism toward the arguments produced by the opposition team, which also accompanied by logical reasoning to strengthen the critics to influence the audience that the opposition teams' arguments were weak at some points. Moreover, predicting assertive speech act was also seemed to be fairly utilized by the government team, which proved that the government team had successfully correlated their arguments with the conditional projection to reinforce the arguments. Likewise, suggesting assertive speech act also took its considerable le role in supporting the government arguments, which exemplified that the government team had found some flaws in the opposition's arguments and proposed substitute solutions, making their arguments seemed superior to the opposition team.
Similarly, the complaining assertive speech act was also moderately exploited during the government speech, which also performed as alternate assertive speech act to demonstrate that the opposition teathe ms' arguments were incomplete and weakened the opposition's arguments at the same time in the audience's eye. This was also followed by few numbers rebutting the assertive speech act performed by the government team, which also indicated that the government had tried to deny the opposition team's arguments. Although the other assertive speech acts were hardly utilized by the government team during their speech, such as reporting, reminding, informing, and claiming, those assertive speech acts had effectively expanded the ideas proposed by the government team by elaborating the arguments using realworld data and past experiences.
Concerning the realization of assertive speech acts performed by the opposition team during the debate, using assertive speech acts was revealed to be different compared to the government team at some points. It was shown that arguing and criticizing assertive speech act almost reached the highest number of altogether just slightly below stating assertive speech act. This indicated that aside from the declarative statements employed within the arguments, the opposition team was revealed to show their strong disagreement toward the government team's arguments (Orin & Yuliasri, 2016). Moreover, this also supported the relative use of rebutting and suggesting assertive speech act, representing that the opposition team intensely provided more disapproval toward the government team. The opposition team had found a mistake within the government team's argument, which made the opposition team disapprove of the argument and propose the alternate condition to tackle the government team's motion.
Meanwhile, the considerable number of stating elaborated with asserting assertive speech act indicated that the opposition produced strong and clear declarative statements in clashing against the government team. In addition, informing and predicting assertive speech act were considerably employed during opposition speech in resisting the government team's arguments. This indicated that the opposition team established their arguments by adding some logical projections and explanations to strengthen the arguments against the government team and convinced the audience that the opposition arguments were superior to the government. Furthermore, the other assertive speech acts were hardly found during the opposition speech, such as claiming, reminding, complaining, and reporting assertive speech. Even though the number of occurrences was insignificant, those assertive speech acts played crucial roles, such as claiming speech act that helped the opposition team to distract their focus as it was only a claim, reminding speech act that helped the opposition team to relate their arguments toward the realworld experience to strengthen the arguments, complaining speech act that helped the opposition team to emphasize the blemish created by government team to deteriorate their arguments, and reporting speech act that helped the opposition team to support the arguments with real data research on the field.
About the similarity of assertive speech acts performed by both government and opposition team, there were some similarities that meaningfully crucial to be scrutinized as both teams employed a lot of assertive speech act with different main objective while having the same goal that was to win the debate. Firstly, there was not any utilization of admitting and disclaiming assertive speech acts either performed by government or opposition team, which also represented that either government or opposition team were well-aware that admitting and disclaiming assertive speech acts would only possess harm than good when those assertive speech acts were delivered during the debate and could lead into their defeat in which some reasons lied beyond this absence. In addition, the government and opposition team possessed similarities in constructing the utterances especially stating assertive speech act using present declarative sentence. All team members were employing declarative sentences in the form of the present tense to end their turn of speaking. Moreover, both the government and opposition teams utilized a similar structure in constructing the predicting assertive speech act. They mostly employed conditional sentences in projecting something in the future to relate their arguments toward the possible result to strengthen their arguments. The ways both government and opposition speakers produced predicting speech act possessed a similar structure in which when a condition is met, another condition will be realized. In addition, the government and opposition team produced the complaining assertive speech act in a similar way in which first they recalled what the opposite team was mentioning, then found the mistakes which finally describe the flaws to the audience. Furthermore, the reporting speech act was also similarly delivered by the government and opposition team when the factual data was found, which could be in the form of a number or percentage analysis showing that the data was valid and could strengthen the arguments without rhetorical explanation, which might lead to the question and criticism.
About the difference possessed by the government and opposition team in realizing assertive speech acts during the debate, the allocation and characteristics of assertive speech act performed by both teams were noticeably shown as both teams carried the different purposes which either proposing or opposing the motion. Firstly, the government team possessed higher employment of assertive speech act were asserting, predicting, reminding, and complaining assertive speech act compared to as performed by the opposition team. The higher number of asserting assertive speech act carried out by the government team indicated that they managed to produce a statement that was strongly believed by them and strongly declared to the audience to influence the audience in viewing the motion they proposed. In addition, the higher number of predicting assertive speech act use had represented that the government team utilized more rhetorical explanation by projecting something in the future to support the motion they were proposing, which might convince the audience about how things were going to happen. Moreover, the government team had already strengthened the arguments by recalling the last events closely related to the motion being discussed by significant use of reminding speech act. Meanwhile, the government team found more flaws within the opposition team's arguments and seemed more critical in establishing arguments by criticizing assertive speech.
Meanwhile, some assertive speech acts performed by the opposition team were shown to be considerably greater than the government team, such as arguing, informing, suggesting, and rebutting. It also showed that the opposition team was strongly against the motion, as indicated by the high occurrences of arguing. This also indicated that the opposition team had successfully employed more efforts to bring the audience into a deeper understanding of the arguments.
Moreover, this also showed that the opposition team assumed that the government team's arguments contained many flaws rather than an opposition team, which made the opposition team suggest alternative options to realize the motion. However, some assertive speech acts were shown to be slightly different in terms of the total occurrences the government and opposition team produced, such as claiming, stating, criticizing, and reporting, which was found mostly higher in the opposition team, indicating that they had maximally created a clash of ideas in strengthening their arguments to win the debate although the distribution that was possessed by opposition team was slightly higher than government team. This is in line with Anam,Rochman, & Indiatmoko (2019) that the choice of speech act use depends on the intention of the speaker and the listener. Therefore, both the government and opposition team utilized different types of speech acts since their objectives and the characteristic of their audience possessed different views (Gusthini, Sobarna, & Amalia 2018;Rosyidi, Mahyuni, & Muhaimi, 2019;and Haucsa, Marzuki, Alek, & Hidayat, 2020).
Regarding the implication of assertive speech acts performed by the government and opposition team toward English education, some noteworthy insinuation was crucial to build communicative skills. Hidayat (2016) and Ulum, Sutopo, & Warsono (2018) stated that by understanding the speech acts in terms of form and usage, the students of EFL/ESL could understand the intended meaning of the utterances. By asserting and stating assertive speech acts, the English learners could also learn the structure of asserting and stating assertive speech acts, which could strongly believe in the motion being discussed. Thus, arguing and rebutting assertive speech act educates the English learners in establishing arguments and disapproving the arguments. Moreover, the criticizing, complaining and suggesting assertive speech act can be utilized by English learners to become critical in scrutinizing something and not taking something for granted. In addition, English students have to be able to perform reminding, reporting, and informing assertive speech act so that their arguments are strong and convince the audience that the ideas are logical, applicable, and based on valid research. Furthermore, the claiming and predicting assertive speech act provides an insight to the English learners to be creative and appealing in composing arguments to the audience. Therefore, teaching speech acts in the classroom need a particular approach to encourage the students to understand better (Shofwan & Mujiyanto, 2018). It also encourages English education students to know how to make words that fit the world correctly.

CONCLUSIONS
The results of the study showed that twelve types of assertive speech acts were found in their utterances during their speech, such as asserting, arguing, informing, claiming, predicting, suggesting, stating, criticizing, rebutting, reminding, complaining, and reporting assertive speech act in which stating assertive speech act had achieved significant used during the government teams' speeches. Meanwhile, arguing and criticizing assertive speech act almost reached the highest number of altogether just slightly below stating assertive speech act which confirmed that aside from the declarative statements employed within the arguments, the opposition team was revealed to show their strong disagreement toward the government team's arguments. Moreover, the realization of the assertive speech act helps English education students to build their communicative skills by considering the purpose and structure of the assertive speech act. It is suggested that during the debate, the speakers could highly reconsider the purpose of their speech in utilizing the speech acts, especially the assertive speech acts, to establish strong arguments either to propose the motion or oppose the motion.
For further study, it is expected that future research could examine the combination of assertive speech acts and the other speech acts in the debate since the speakers do not merely use assertive speech acts. Since this study also focused on the pedagogical implication for English education, it would be better if future research could scrutinize the implementation of speech acts during the ESL or EFL classroom.