Examining the Role of Classroom Interaction in the Construction of Power and Identity

Abstract

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