Power Relation and Critical Pedagogy in Classroom Discussions: a Case Study of EFL Education in China

摘要

Based on the analysis of discourse in an EFL classroom engaging critical pedagogy, this paper argues that even though critical pedagogy encourages the voices of students, it is still obvious to find evidences of power relation in classroom interaction. Accordingly, a case study is conducted to explore how to unveil the unbalanced power relation in such classroom setting by analyzing data in classroom observation, audio recording and interviews from the phonological level, lexical level, conversational structure level, and generic structure level. It is hoped that teachers could get some enlightenment on ways of empowering both teacher and students in future educational activities.