Interactional power in classroom discourse in to sir with love and a school of mischief makers / Ahmed Mohamed Alaa Eldin Mohamed ; Supervised Norice William Methias

Thesis (M.A.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

This study focuses on student strategies for interactional power in classroom discourse through the analysis of two literary works: To Sir with Love and A School of Mischief Makers. It attempts to analyze such power according to Sinclair and Coulthard's 1975 Initiation-Response-Follow-up (IRF) model. The analyzed data necessitated making some modifications to the IRF: creating a new 'pre-teaching disciplinary' exchange; providing a more accurate definition to the elicitation, check, and directive acts as well as creating a new 'disciplinary directive' act; crafting several other new acts; and accepting the different deviant structures of the IRF. Students are found to use multiple strategies to resist the teacher's power: asking questions, creating disorder, refusing to comply, contributing without being nominated, using humor, and responding sarcastically and impolitely. Adding to this, nomination has limited occurrence in the data, which stands against the teacher's overall power status. Also, the use of display and referential questions does not recur much in the data. Moreover, the teacher's role as the manager faces much challenge by the students. Concerning challenging the role of the primary knower, though it is of rare occurrence, it is found to be a challenge to the teacher as the primary knower of the world and not of the topic of the lesson. Eventually, in both works, the teacher is found to have the last word. The teacher-student relationship in both works develops from a relationship of struggle and resistance to a relationship of cooperation and compliance

Issued also as CD