Power and Interactional Asymmetries in a multicultural classroom of Portuguese as a Foreign Language

In conversation activities in foreign language classrooms, there are exchanges that deploy the institutionality of the encounter and that involve power relations through task orientation and execution. From this, we aim at examining how students engage in an oral practice task in a classroom in which Portuguese is taught as a foreign language at a Brazilian public university. So in this sense, we intend to investigate the extent to which students orient to this institutional setting’s specific goal. For this, we used the Interactional Sociolinguistics’ and the Conversation Analysis’ methodological approaches. Also, we utilized the concepts of Face (GOFFMAN, 1980), Frame (BATESON, 2002; GOFFMAN, 1974; TANNEN; WALLAT, 2002) and Role (GOFFMAN, 1974; SARANGI, 2010). Besides those constructs, we discuss the notion of institutional interaction, mainly from Heritage (1997) and Arminen (2005). Furthermore, we presented the concepts of asymmetry (LINELL; LUCKMAN, 1991) and institutional asymmetries (HERITAGE, 1997) – the latter is investigated as one the dimensions of institutionality – and examined how their reduction occurs. In order for one to understand this classroom system as a dynamic structure, we analyzed the concept of power (FOUCAULT, 1972). As a result, the transcripts – made according to the Jefferson model, as seen in Loder (2008) – showed that students perform actions typical of the teacher role and that these actions encompass face work. The results suggest that students’ actions do not countervail the institution, even when students exert them. Instead, they favor a language learning environment in which clients demonstrate agency and prominence.