Students’ Discourse Power In The Office Hour Given By Graduate Teaching Assistants

This thesis conducts a discourse analysis of interactions between undergraduatestudents and graduate student teaching assistants (henceforth TAs) in the office hour,focusing on the part of students, to analyze how the students communicate in thediscourse to exercise their power.It is assumed that TAs, acting in the role of teachers in the office hour context, arein control of the local power; and the local power asymmetry in scholarly context isusually of the imbalance with TAs on the higher end and students on the lower end. Thestudy demonstrates, however, that the students can change the power asymmetry andcontrol the local interaction, even within IRE (Initiation-Response-Evaluation) structure,which is a typical structure for teachers to direct the discourse development.This study analyzes students’ power in TA-student interactions during the officehour in Chongqing University with the five devices of students of exercising powerproposed by Antonia Candela. Her research conducts a conversational analysis ofstudents’ power with an ethnographic perspective during teacher-student interactionsand reveals that students can reverse the interactional roles, control the local interactionand exercise their power with these five devices. The five devices are (1) notparticipating in the discussion,(2) defending their explanations,(3) evaluating teacher’sor other student’s explanations,(4) questioning the teacher’s explanations, and/or (5)initiating topics for discussion. It starts with Candela’s five devices and also developswith its own new findings about office hour interaction. The study shows how studentsexercise power with the five devices and demonstrates in what percentage they use witheach of them so as to conclude the reason for the usage preference of the five devices. Itexplores in a theoretically new angle of researching on students’ discourse power in theoffice hour given by graduate TAs and practically provides reference for improvementof teaching performance of TAs’ office hour.