A Case Study Of Student Discourse Silence At A Local University

At the universities,there is an indisputable fact that students are discursively silent.Discourse silence hinders the development of university students’ discourse skills and affects their educational participation.The silence of university student discourse is not only a personal issue of psychology and personality,but is also embedded by the power of social,multi-stakeholders.Based on the case of University Y,this study adopts a constructivist paradigm to explore the mechanisms of influence and the interests behind the silencing of student discourse in local universities.The data were collected through semi-open-ended interviews,non-participant observation and physical collection,and interpreted by contextual and class analysis.Focusing on power,the study selected two full-time teachers,two administrators and 15 university students as the main subjects,with full-time teachers representing intellectual power,administrators representing managerial power and students representing evaluative power,and tapped into four dimensions:institutional embedding,cultural embedding,relational embedding and cognitive embedding.The study found that:Firstly,the Y has been built with both innovation and tradition,and the imperfection of the reforms has led to the continuation of traditional models in most of these ideologies and behavioral styles.Factors such as overwhelming intellectual superiority,controlling management and evaluation anxiety create unequal discursive positions and weaken the discursive power of students.Secondly,based on this case scenario,of the three types of power represented by stakeholders,managerial power has the strongest influence on the silencing of student discourse,with administrators having a more immediate interest in students and students facing a clear discursive hierarchy of administrators.Furthermore,different powers have an impact on the silencing of student discourse in all four dimensions of institutional,cultural,relational and cognitive embedding.Among the proximal antecedents are cognitive embedding and cultural embedding.Stakeholders dominate the discursive field with thinking over,power over,procedural malfeasance and discursive hegemony,regulating,controlling and dominating students’ discourse,reinforcing their discursive silence.Furthermore,implicit behind this mechanism of influence is the teachers’assertion of intellectual authority,the administrators’ desire for high power distance and the students’ interest in pursuing short-term utilitarianism.In order to improve the negative silence of students in local universities,this study makes the following reflections,i.e.to train students’ discourse habits and overcome discourse anxiety:to transform the traditional concept of faculty members and construct dialogue communication;to accelerate the transformation of university characterization and enhance discourse confidence,etc.