THE INFLUENCE OF TEACHER-STUDENT POWER DYNAMICS ON LEARNING: A LINGUISTIC AND DISCOURSE-ANALYTICAL STUDY

Abstract

The paper explores the construction and maintenance of teacher-student power relations in the everyday classroom discourse with the help of Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation and Interaction Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, and corpus-based linguistic methods. The method of data collection was also based on classroom video recordings, transcriptions, and corpus collections in order to explore the linguistic and interactional techniques, which indicate authority, control access, and student identity. The research results indicate that the teacher dominance can be found in the directive speech act, evaluative feedback, the IRF interactional pattern, and repetitive lexical clusters that support institutional control. Weakly informative, tentative, and seeking permission were the main character traits of the speech of students, which points to low agency and increased sensitivity to teacher judgment. The research also discovered that asymmetrical relation was also exacerbated by the tone changes, hesitations, and culturally inculcated code switching. Such findings are in line with previous studies that identify classroom discourse as a key process by which power is performed and learning chances are created. The conclusion of the study is that power is not reproduced out of individual commands but patterned linguistic practices that are embedded in classroom interaction. It suggests that more dialogic, student-based discourse practices should be adopted to encourage equal participation and create more collaborative learning processes.