The Philosophy of Teachers’ Power based on Leech’s Politeness Maxims in Iranian Context

The philosophy of education is an important issue in learning and teaching. Also, the relationship between teachers’ power and abilities can tremendously influence the learners. The purpose of this article is to explore the practice of power bases and Leech’s (1983) politeness maxims among Iranian teachers. A descriptive-qualitative method is used in this research. To this end, nineteen sessions of five classes of five different teachers in a private institute were audio-recorded and transcribed. In the second step of this study, the learners were asked to fill out a questionnaire consisting of 25 Likert-scale items relating to power and politeness issues. In the last stage, four teachers were asked to take part in an interview with the researchers for gathering the complementary data. The classes being observed were chosen based on the rules of convenience sampling method and among young-adult, pre-intermediate learners. The results revealed that Legitimate power among the power base uses and Tact maxim among the politeness maxim practices were the mostly used types of all. Also, it was concluded that in most cases, teachers used one form or a combination of politeness maxims with the practice of power bases.