A Critical Analysis Of Teacher Talk

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a branch of study originated fromcritical linguistics developed by Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress in the late1970s and early1980s. The aim of CDA is to relate discourse with power andmake transparent the power relationship and ideologies embedded in language.Hallidayan Systemic-Functional linguistics has long been regarded as the majoranalytic tool of CDA. Since its birth, CDA has taken as its objects such discourseas media discourse, political speeches, official documents, etc. However, teachertalk, as a spoken discourse, has seldom been a focus of CDA.As Foucault points out, classroom is a good place for teachers to exercisepower which can be termed teacher power. According to French and Raven,teacher power can be classified into legitimate power, reward power, coercivepower, attractive power and expert power. Thus in this paper, an initial attempt ismade to, qualitatively and quantitatively, study teacher talk from the perspectiveof CDA in order to reveal the exercise of these teacher powers in class. For thispurpose, two studies have been carried out among8English major teachers and80English major students in the English Department at Huaqiao University. Firstof all, eight periods of classes given by the eight teachers are recorded and theseaudio-recordings are transcribed to form a teacher talk corpus. Then bothstudents and teachers are invited to complete a questionnaire to grade the actualuse of teacher powers in class (the highest point is3while the lowest is0).With the aid of some research instruments, several conclusions aredrawn as follows.1. First and foremost, CDA is to proven to be effective in revealing teacherpower embedded in teacher talk. In addition to Halliday’s Systemic-FunctionalGrammar, the method of classifying and analyzing directives in Speech ActTheory also play an active role in the critical analysis of teacher talk.2. In the second place, data in Teacher Talk Corpus shows that all the five types of teacher power are operated in the class, among which the most evidentones are legitimate power and reward power, which partially corresponds withthe original assumption. In general, legitimate and reward power are manifestedby the large number of directives and interruptions, and praises. While coercive,attractive and expert powers are embodied in the employment of threats orcriticism, investment in “personality capital” and the plural forms of firstpersonal pronoun like we/us/our/ourselves, as well as authority in knowledgerespectively.3. A mitigation strategy is observed in the corpus besides the execution ofteacher power. This strategy, namely the application of tag questions, has thefunction of reducing the effect of teacher powers upon students. However, theoperation of teacher powers in class still takes the leading role.4. Data from the questionnaires demonstrate a high score of legitimatepower given by students and teachers, which accords with the finding in the firstresearch. However, both teachers and students grade the attractive and expertpower by more than2points whereas these two powers are not readily identifiedin the foregoing research.5. By comparing the data in students’ and teachers’ questionnaires, twodifferences can be recognized. The first difference is about the reward power,which students do not consider as evident as teachers do in class. Secondly, inrespect of coercive power, more actual uses of coercive power are perceived bystudents than by teachers themselves.The originality of this MA thesis is that it makes an innovative connectionbetween CDA and teacher talk. Then apart from Halliday’s SFG, directives arealso incorporated into the framework of CDA for the further study of teacher talk.In spite of the conclusion and originality, limitations are also put forward in hopeof a more persuasive and comprehensive analysis of teacher talk from CDA’sangle in the future.