Constructing Pedagogical Power Relationships: A Corpus Analysis of Lexicogrammatical Features of Lesson Plans

This paper analyzes how teachers of English in Japanese universities and their students are lexically and grammatically represented in a large corpus of published lesson plans in order to better understand how teachers construct the power dynamic between these students and teachers. Using corpus linguistics tools with a critical discourse analysis framework, I found that teachers and students were represented in significantly different ways: while "students" were the most lexically frequent item in the corpus, "teachers" were often represented in grammatical constructions such as passives and imperatives that caused them to be lexically elided from the text. These elisions (contradictorily) both hid and reinforced the teacher's power. As a consequence, on the surface the corpus appears to be student-focused, but in fact it acts discursively to centralize teachers and naturalize teacher power in English language lessons.