Teacher Power and Student Behaviors: Insights from Vietnamese Higher Education Classrooms

Power is understood as a process exercised and negotiated in an English-as-a-foreign-language interaction. This article aims to fill the gaps of literature in researching the relationship between teachers' power and students’ learning behavior in Vietnamese classroom interaction as there was little research on how teachers’ use of power can exert educational effects on students, and which changes the way students acquire or learn in general and particularly language. The data came from an ethnographic approach, including audio-recording, classroom observation, and teacher interviews. By employing the tools of critical discourse analysis, the analyses bring together the view of the subject of the study with classroom power relations to give deep insights into the microlevel classroom discourse and the macrolevel of professional discourse (in this case, it is understood as pedagogical discourse). The findings show how power was negotiated over in different forms of classroom behavior. Besides, the discursive classroom practices reveal the relationship between classroom behavior norms that the teachers attempted to impose and the well-known student-centeredness. Implications have been worked out through a proposal of a classroom interaction structure where a constructivist learning environment or a classroom of happiness is aimed to create, which helps increase the learning potential and capacity of students.