Constructing Power In English Academic Spoken Discourse

As an important phenomenon, power and its construction attract much attention from various research fields. Many studies have been conducted to probe into the construction of power. However, few studies have discussed how and why the speakers construct power in academic spoken discourse.This study aims to find out the types of power in English academic spoken discourse, and to investigate how and why the speakers construct different types of power through the use of language in verbal communication. In order to achieve these goals, data covering different academic divisions of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, Physical Sciences and Engineering are collected from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English(MICASE).This study establishes the theoretical framework by putting forward the dimensions for the analysis of power construction in English academic spoken discourse, covering the taxonomy of power in academic spoken discourse, the strategies adopted to construct power in academic spoken discourse, and the speakers’ motivations of constructing power in English academic spoken discourse.The analysis of the data within the established theoretical framework yields the following results:(1) Four types of power are constructed by teachers or instructors/tutors in English academic interaction, namely high institutional power, high personal power,equal power and low personal power.(2) Strategies such as personal pronouns, topic control, questions, hedges,repetitions and interruptions contribute to power construction in English academic spoken discourse. One strategy is not exclusively belongs to certain type of power,and different strategies may be combined to construct one type of power.(3) Concerning the process of power construction, it apparently shows the dynamic features in English academic spoken discourse. The speakers are making constant choices of the types of power and the pragma-linguistic strategies to construct certain type of power. Although their social roles and status are relatively fixed, the power constructed among the teachers and the students may vary in accordance with the speakers’ communicative needs. Therefore, power should not be regarded as a static phenomenon, and power construction is ought to be analyzed in adynamic way.(4) With regards to the potential reasons for different types of power construction,the Linguistic Adaptation Theory was adopted to do the analyzing work. Specifically,speakers’ adaptation to mental and social factors contributes to illustrating their motivations of power construction. The purpose of constructing different types of power in English academic spoken discourse is closely related to the satisfaction of participants’ communicative needs, including achieving transactional goals, meeting face wants, performing rights and obligations.Theoretically, this study not only exemplifies the different types of power reflected in English academic spoken discourse, but also clarifies the strategies adopted to construct power in verbal communication. It also contributes to the understanding of speakers’ pragmatic motivation to construct power in academic spoken discourse. More importantly, it deepens the research on power construction in English academic spoken discourse in a dynamic way. Practically, the present study implies that communicators in an academic community should be in possession of the consciousness of power construction. At the same time, the present study may have some pedagogical implications for teachers, by providing suggestions for their academic supervision, and for both English language teachers and learners, by drawing their attention to using strategies to construct power and skillfully achieving their communication goals in academic spoken discourse.