Résumé:
Critical pedagogy is a social constructionist approach to teaching that aims at fostering
learners’ identities through transferring power from teachers to students inside the
classroom. Based on the argument that power transfer occurs through everyday
discursive practice rather than through mere attitude, the present study provides a way
of analyzing how power and identity are negotiated during teacher-student interactions
in an oral classroom by Algerian university students of English. More specifically, it
examined the way foreign language teacher and learner’s power and identity could be
shaped through interaction in the classroom and studied the extent to which the classroom
interaction contributed to transferring power from the teacher to the student at the micro
level. In order to achieve this aim, a checklist for analyzing classroom interaction was
designed using Bucholtz and Hall’s framework. This checklist operationalized identity
construction and power transfer at the micro level in terms of four principles: emergence,
indexicality, relationality, and positionality. This checklist was used in the observation
and analysis of teacher-students interaction of forty second year students’ oral expression
classroom at the department of English language at Mohammed Saddik ben Yahia
University for a period of five weeks. The findings of the research revealed that the major
hindrance to identity construction through power transfer from teacher to student at the
micro level is the teacher’s directive identity
