Revealing Teachers’ Power through Speech Acts in EFL Classroom Interaction

Speech act is the verbal language behavior showing the interplay between utterance and action. It also depicts language use by teachers to achieve instructional goals in English as Foreign Language classroom context (henceforth, EFL). This research mainly unveils speech act typically addressing the teachers’ power. Descriptive qualitative research method was utilized to account for speech acts and the teacher’s power. Non-participant direct observation with recording technique was employed to gather the natural data. The data were analyzed through qualitative model and padan method with pragmatic unit analysis. The results demonstrated that directive and expressive speech acts were mostly employed by the teachers in the interaction with the students for specific instructional ends. The speech acts represented different powers maintained by the EFL teachers during classroom interaction such as legitimate, referent, expert, and reward. The findings showcase that the use of speech acts enacted and reinforced four prominent powers of EFL teachers in classroom interaction. Accordingly, the current study has the implication to the reflective use of speech acts for the engaging classroom interaction and sheds lights for future research on teacher-student dynamics in EFL setting.