“The Right Things Are What I Expect Them to Do”: Negotiation of Power Relations in an English Classroom

Abstract

Theoretically informed by a Foucauldian understanding of power, this article documents how power is exercised and resisted in an English-as-a-foreign-language context. In particular, the article focuses on individual seatwork, during which students were working individually on written exercises, as one of the three basic modes of teaching/learning in the lessons observed. By employing the tools of critical discourse analytical methods within an ethnographic approach, the analysis brings together the teacher's perspectives and classroom power relations to generate insights into the interplay between the microlevel classroom discourse and the macrolevel professional discourses. While the observation data demonstrate how power was negotiated over and through different kinds of classroom behavior, the interview data reveal the relationship between the norms of classroom behavior that the teacher sought to impose and the traditional teacher-centered, and control and authority-based, professional discourses.

Keywords:

• power relations
• classroom discourse
• EFL
• critical pedagogies
• ethnography

Notes

¹While acknowledging the ideologically contested nature of the term, I use it here with particular reference to the lack of any official status attached to the English language in Turkey.

²The issue of student resistance requires a note of caution. Having aligned with a Foucauldian understanding of power, I have used the term resistance in accounting for the multiple tensions and conflicts that emerged between the teacher and the students. However, it is too important to attend to Giroux's distinction between resistance and opposition. Giroux (1983, p. 109) warns that the concept of resistance must not be allowed to become a category indiscriminately attached to any instance of oppositional behavior, maintaining that resistance displays ideological clarity and commitment to collective action for social transformation (in Canagarajah, 1999, pp. 97–98). Therefore, although at one level their responses, actions, and behaviors enable them to engage the classroom interaction in a way that would allow them to negotiate and change the rules, norms, and obligations, they do not seem to fall under Giroux's definition of resistance as they at least lack ideological clarity.

³Note that there is strong evidence in the data that in contexts where students' first language is not a shared code with the teacher, the excessive or purposeful use of students' first language by them may serve to excercise power over the teacher or function as a means of student resistance. Yet, the discussion on the issue of students' first language has been excluded here due to lack of space.