This research study discusses about expressive speech act and the politeness strategy employed in the three textbooks of Senior High School. The objectives of the study are to identify the type of expressive speech acts found in the dialogues, to investigate the types of expressive speech act strategies, and to explore the realization of politeness strategies found in the three textbooks. This research applies qualitative content analysis as the technique of the research. By applying this method, the researcher uses the dialogue section in the three textbooks as the data source, while the data of the research are expressive speech act utterances found. The writer applied Norrick’s (1978) classification of expressive speech act and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategy as the underlying theories. The results of the research show that there are 83 expressive speech act utterances or they can be classified into 54 exerpts. The researcher found the expression of Thanking as the most expressive speech act occurs in the textbooks with 31 utterances, followed by Greeting, Congratulating, Lamenting, and Condoling expression. Explicit expression appears the most in the strategy in thanking, followed by less formal strategy in greeting, assessing the situation positively in congratulating, sadness in lamenting, and expression of sympathy in condoling. Each of these speech acts employs positive politeness as their strategy the most. Positive politeness holds as many as 68 utterances, followed by negative politeness, and the last is bald on record.

Keywords: Expressive Speech Act, Politeness Strategy