Turn-taking in university seminars : A study of discourse management and power asymmetry in academic classroom settings

Abstract: The present study analyses turn-taking in spoken discourse in seminar settings of higher education. The aim of the study is two-fold, (i) to explore how teachers organize their classroom discourse in terms of turn-taking structure, discursive organization and the subject positions of teachers and students and (ii) to further explore how power asymmetry in the teacher-student relationship may be realized in institutional discourse settings such as classrooms. Through the frameworks of institutional discourse, conversation analysis (CA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), the study encompasses analyses of seminar data culled from The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. The study analyses the discourse organization of two different seminars in social studies and sciences by their turn-taking structure, turn-distribution and activity types to discuss the institutional properties of the interactions and the power asymmetry between participants. The analysis shows that the discursive subject roles of “teacher” and “student” have different claims to power and that the participants are more or less restricted by both the structure of the turn-taking systems and the activity types of the seminars. The teachers of the two seminars are further shown to restrict their students’ speaking rights and discursive mobility, using different discursive strategies to achieve their goals and to exercise control over the discourse, but that some students more or less effectively resist this control by utilizing the discourse structure and its resources to their advantage.