"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.