Cairo University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English Language and Literature

Interactional Power in Classroom Discourse in To Sir with

Love and A School of Mischief Makers

By

Ahmed Mohamed Alaa Eldin Mohamed

A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the M.A. Degree

Under the Supervision of

Associate Professor Norice William Methias

July 2015

Abstract

Thesis Title. Interactional Power in Classroom Discourse in To Sir with Love and A School of

Mischief Makers. Submitted by. Ahmed Mohamed Alaa Eldin Mohamed.

This study focuses on student strategies for interactional power in classroom discourse through

the analysis of two literary works: To Sir with Love and A School of Mischief Makers. It attempts

to analyze such power according to Sinclair and Coulthard's 1975 Initiation-Response-Follow-up

(IRF) model. The analyzed data necessitated making some modifications to the IRF: creating a

new 'pre-teaching disciplinary' exchange; providing a more accurate definition to the elicitation,

check, and directive acts as well as creating a new 'disciplinary directive' act; crafting several

other new acts; and accepting the different deviant structures of the IRF. Students are found to

use multiple strategies to resist the teacher's power: asking questions, creating disorder, refusing

to comply, contributing without being nominated, using humor, and responding sarcastically and

impolitely. Adding to this, nomination has limited occurrence in the data, which stands against

the teacher's overall power status. Also, the use of display and referential questions does not

recur much in the data. Moreover, the teacher's role as the manager faces much challenge by the

students. Concerning challenging the role of the primary knower, though it is of rare occurrence,

it is found to be a challenge to the teacher as the primary knower of the world and not of the

topic of the lesson. Eventually, in both works, the teacher is found to have the last word. The

teacher-student relationship in both works develops from a relationship of struggle and resistance

to a relationship of cooperation and compliance.

Keywords. Power, Classroom Discourse, Initiation-Response-Follow-up (IRF) Model.