‘The word isn't there!’: a Foucauldian approach to power negotiation in an instructional interaction across linguistic and cultural boundaries

Abstract

Power is often stabilized as status, role, and expertise that create discourse variations in existing studies on nonnative speakers' (NNSs) interactions with native speakers (NSs). The ethnolinguistic approach views NSs as the powerful and dominant group due to their linguistic status. In contrast, the discourse domain approach argues that NNSs are capable of giving a better discourse performance than NSs if they have the expertise on the topic. Drawing on Foucault's conceptualization of power, the present study argues that power is not monolithic and static, but dynamic and negotiable. The discourse under consideration represents an instructional interaction between an NNS teacher and a NS college student. A close analysis of the discourse reveals that neither the NS student's linguistic status nor the NNS teacher's expertise is taken for granted as a given privilege, but both are actually negotiated. Power negotiation involves the use of language resources, interactional skills, and contextual knowledge in the participants' attempts to achieve their respective situational goals.

Keywords:

• power negotiation
• instructional discourse
• linguistic status
• expertise
• (non)native speaker
• international teaching assistant

Acknowledgements

This article is dedicated to all foreign-born instructors in the USA. The author is grateful to Robert E. Sanders and François Cooren for their support to this line of research in the first place.

Special thanks are extended to Joan K. Hall, Stephen D. Looney, Emily R. Butler, and all the participants of the ‘CA for ITA’ colloquium at the annual convention of American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2012. Intended as a response to the concerns at the colloquium, this article demonstrates that the identification of nonnativeness may not be an entirely linguistic matter, but a social relational issue which becomes salient in a conflicting social interaction.

Notes

‘ITA’ is an acronym for international teaching assistants in US universities. While not all international teaching assistants are NNSs of English, existing studies center on the linguistic and sociocultural differences of those nonnative speaking, foreign-born graduate students who work as temporary faculty in US research universities. To keep it consistent with existing work, the present study, while aware of its referential difficulty, continues to use the acronym ‘ITA’.

‘Mr’ is used for English readers to identify the participant's identity (not the status).

It should be more desirable for research to videotape the interaction, but the university Institutional Review Board (IRB) was concerned about any unpredictable and undesirable effects on the student and the international teaching assistant if their identity was revealed. The ITA participant was also concerned about any negative influence of this research on his employment. It was then agreed that the interaction would be audio-recorded only to minimize the chance of revealing the participants' identity.