Abstract

The role of power in an English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom in secondary education has been widely investigated by action researchers such as Angel Lin in Hong Kong. Nonetheless, few studies have addressed this specific issue in tertiary education. This study aims to bridge the gap by using the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to uncover the relationship between language and power at the tertiary level. In class, the teacher used power and varied linguistic features to facilitate classroom teaching and learning. In this aspect, the socio-cognitive conditions that contribute to teaching and learning at tertiary setting are illuminated. The major methods are the tools (i.e., three questions) of CDA for analyzing the transcriptions of one English lesson, taken from the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English. A qualitative discourse analysis is used to interpret the selected spoken data; this article is concerned with understanding the distinctive ways of language use and the reasons behind it.