Theoretically informed by Foucauldian conception of power and politics (Foucault, 1977, 1994), this paper presents a critical analysis of an English classroom discourse with a focus on the workings of power relations between the teacher and the students operating at the micro level of classroom interaction. The research context was a year-seven English classroom in a private elementary school located in Istanbul, Turkey, and the database of the study consists of ethnographic field notes, interviews, and audio recordings made observing the classes over a period of five months. While attending to the holistic nature of the classroom as a social context through an ethnographic approach (Carspecken, 1996), the study has also utilized the tools of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Gee 2005), which has allowed me to analyse classroom interaction as a discourse type with an emphasis on the subject positions it sets up for teachers and learners since, as Fairclough (1989) argues, it is only by occupying these positions that one becomes a teacher or a learner. The analysis reveals how power relations are constructed and negotiated across various aspects of classroom interaction, including interactional routines, directing, questioning, participation rights, organization of classroom space and, control of students’ bodies. Finally, building on the premise that discourse models - the largely unconscious theories we hold that help us make sense of texts and the world - mediate between the micro level of interaction and the macro level of institutions as they operate to create the complex patterns of institutions (Gee, 2005), I argue that the ways the teacher acted and talked in the classroom were primarily informed by relatively traditional teacher-centred and authority- and control-based professional discourses and, explore their implications for the functioning of schools through a discussion of the interplay between the micro-level classroom discourse and the macro-level professional/institutional discourses.

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