Feature Article
An Ethnographic Interpretation ofDisciplinary Power Within the EFL Classroom
Toru Hanaki
Nanzan University
本論は、大学のEFL授業における「規律の権力（disciplinary
power）」の作用について考察する。特に、「座席の指定」と「リフレクション・ペーパー」という二つの事例を取り上げ、そこに潜在する権力関係をミシェル・フーコーの代表的著作『監獄の誕生―監視と処罰』における議論を援用しながら明らかにする。考察の結果、EFL授業における「規律の権力」を教師が巧みに利用することで、学生を主体とした学びの共同体を作り出すことが可能であると結論する。

Introduction
This article is concerned with how to establish a sense of discipline
within English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms at the university
level. Some college English instructors are fortunate enough to
guide highly motivated students to refine their already adequate
communicative English skills, while other less fortunate ones (if it isfair to use such an expression) must begin by cultivating their students’motivation and willingness to learn English. In either case, however,appropriate control of classroom activities is the key to success in any
EFL class (or perhaps in any class). How can college English instructors
bring a necessary sense of discipline (i.e., externally or internallyimposed willingness to learn) into their classes? To answer this criticalquestion, I reflect on my experiences teaching English at a Japanese
university and identify some effective strategies to motivate the students
to be more engaged in the class activities.
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HanakiIn my later analysis of the function of disciplinary power within
EFL classes, I will rely on the French philosopher Michel Foucault’scontemplation on power within modern society. In a sense, Foucault’sseries of work (e.g., 1972; 1977; 1978) have focused primarily on
explicating the process in which power is constructed, deconstructed,
and reconstructed through discursive practices within a society. In
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), perhaps his mostwidely read volume, Foucault illustrates how the external disciplineof bodies (e.g., imprisonment) leads to the internal discipline of minds(e.g., normalization of the prisoner’s soul). Viewing a classroom as asmall society (Dewey, 1963; Freire, 1970), I apply this Foucauldian
notion of discipline in interpreting the power dynamics within EFL
classrooms.
This reflective analysis is an ethnographic one, which involves acertain amount of description. This description is necessary to obtaina deeper understanding of the communicative phenomena underinvestigation. As noted American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973,
pp. 3-30) convincingly argued, “thick description” is fundamental
to grasping the meaning of local cultural practices. Although somereaders might find some of my description redundant or unnecessary,conversely I believe that they are significant in “showing” (notnecessarily “telling”) what is actually happening in the classroom. In
addition, this article does not begin with a review of existing literature
to generate hypotheses, followed by sections explicating researchmethod, analysis, discussion, and so forth, as required for a standard
positivist research paper. Instead, the humanistic orientation of thisarticle dictates beginning with rich illustrations of each case, followed
by inductive analyses of those cases then supported by relevant
theoretical work, in this case Michel Foucault’s philosophical reflection
on disciplinary power. For this reason, I would ask the reader to bepatient and open to this perhaps unfamiliar mode of writing.
At this point, it seems academically ethical for me to state that I
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am trained not in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages (TESOL) but in Communication Studies. Therefore, I am
more familiar with the literature and way of thinking frequently
employed in my own field than with those in TESOL. Furthermore, I
have been teaching English at a Japanese university for just over threesemesters, after having taught undergraduate communication courses
in the U.S. for several years (see Hanaki, 2007, for details). Therefore, I
have considerably less experience as an EFL instructor than many of thereaders. However, I do not believe that this diminishes my credibility
as the author of this article. At times, a new insight can be obtained byshedding new light onto a familiar issue from a different angle. In thatsense, my expertise in another academic field and lack of experiencein EFL could have the potential to bring an alternative perspective tothe study of human interaction within EFL classrooms.

Ethnographic Data
The ethnographic data for this analysis was obtained from myexperience teaching English for three semesters at a private university
in central Japan. In 2006, I taught courses in English communicationand English reading to students majoring in information sciences;
those students were mostly male and not very motivated to learn
English. This academic year, I have been teaching courses in English
communication, English reading, and English writing to the students
majoring in British and American language and culture; those students
are mostly female and generally highly motivated to learn English.
The size of the classes was between 20 and 30 students in both cases.
From these teaching experiences, the following sections draw on two
particular cases that are especially pertinent to understanding thefunction of disciplinary power within EFL classrooms, that is, the cases
concerning seat assignment and reflection paper.

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HanakiSeat Assignment
Let us begin this section with a quote from my teaching notes fromone of the first English communication courses that I taught. The course
was designed for information sciences majors.
Before beginning to teach this class, I had never thought ofassigning seats for college students. I wanted my students tosit anywhere they felt comfortable so they could concentrateon their study. Respecting the students’ spontaneity, I did not
impose a sitting arrangement in this English class. As a result,the students usually sat in the same place with the same friends
in every class. The first few classes went well. The students
concentrated on the class activities, including much of the
English conversation practice with their friends. After a while,
however, the students became excessively used to talking to thesame friends, lost concentration, and sometimes began talking
with friends in Japanese. I asked them to change partners asnecessary, but they were not willing to do so. Therefore, I
decided to assign different seats to the students every time we
met so that they could practice conversations with a variety ofpartners.
The students seemed to dislike this system of seat assignment
initially. Many of them said, “I feel uncomfortable sitting andtalking with unfamiliar classmates.” I told them, “You will feel
uncomfortable only in the beginning. You will get to know allof your classmates before too long, and then you will feel more
comfortable. There are 30 students in this room. It would beboring if you kept talking with the same people throughout
the year. We can learn much more from differences than fromsimilarities. Try to talk to different people each time. That is
an important communication skill to learn.” As the semester
proceeded, the students gradually began to understand the22

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benefits of talking with a diverse set of classmates. The morethey did not know about their conversation partner, the more
topics they had to discuss with each other. At the end of thesemester, many students wrote on a feedback form, “I enjoyedtalking to many different people in this class.” Although it would
be ideal if the students could start a conversation with a newpartner spontaneously, seat assignment could be an effective
alternative.
Since this time, I have consistently assigned seats in most of myEnglish classes with much success. Since I decided to introduce thesystem from the beginning of the course, very few students havecomplained about it. Seat assignment enables students to practice theirEnglish with different classmates every time. Even when the students
repeat the same exercises in a series of classes, they could be stimulated
and enlivened by continuous encounters with new classmates. At thesame time, seat assignment prevents the students from forming exclusive
peer groups. Yet, what does this case of seat assignment inform us interms of establishing a sense of discipline within the classroom?
The central issue here is that by assigning seats regardless of thestudents’ own preferences, the teacher is exercising disciplinary powerover the students’ bodies, and the discipline over the students’ bodies
leads to the discipline over their minds. To clarify this point, Michel
Foucault’s (1977) influential volume Discipline and Punish: The Birthof the Prison provides theoretical support.
In Part III of Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) argues that by
distributing the body within a certain space and restricting the behavior
according to a certain time schedule, society shapes the souls of thepeople. The discipline of the body leads to the discipline of the soul,so that the person can be incorporated into society. Foucault uses theword normalization to call this incorporation of a person into society.
When society fails to normalize a person, the person becomes deviant23

Hanakior criminal. Criminals must be sent to the prison where their bodies
are disciplined and their souls are normalized.
Because the classroom is a small society characterized by its own
unique politics (Dewey, 1963; Freire, 1970), the Foucauldian analysis
of modern society reasonably applies to the function of disciplinary
power within EFL classrooms. Seat assignment demonstrates theteacher’s exercise of authoritative power in distributing each student’s
body to a certain place at a certain time. This practice not only enables
the students to interact with a variety of classmates but also instills a
sense of discipline into the mind of each student. The distribution of
students’ bodies across the classroom forces their minds to follow theeducational norm set by the course. Thus, seat assignment represents
the implicit dimension of discipline, adjusting students to the course
objectives.

Reflection Paper
In a similar vein, the following episode from my teaching notes
illustrates yet another potential way in which a sense of discipline
could be attained. This note is about the same course as the previous
one.
I wished my students to be truly interested in learning English
so that they would participate in class activities without any
reward or punishment from the teacher. With that spirit, after
discussing a basic pattern of conversation on a specific topic(e.g., talking about movies, staying at a hotel, etc.) from the
textbook, I simply asked my students to have a free conversation
with an assigned partner based on the conversation model.
However, after managing to utter a few English sentences,most of the pairs tended to start chatting in Japanese or juststopped talking. I wondered why they were not willing tocontinue the conversation. They might have lacked confidence
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OnCUE Journalin their English, or they might have felt uncomfortable talking
to unfamiliar classmates in any case. If not, the students might
have tried to pass the class with the least effort, especially when
their major was not directly related to English, as in this case. It
would also be possible that the students did not want to show
off their English skills in front of other students because theact might isolate them from the class. Some young Japanese
students tend to be afraid of looking like a “good student” whois considered not so “cool.”
Whatever the reasons might have been, I needed to motivate
my students somehow to take the conversation practice more
seriously. After some thought, I realized that my students needed
what I call “teacher’s gaze” as an incentive to be engaged in
the class activities. In other words, the students had to be undersome sort of educational surveillance provided by their teacher
in order to focus on the conversation practice. Nevertheless,it was impossible for me to attend to all the conversations by
the 15 pairs of students at the same time. Therefore, I decided
to ask the students to write down their conversations on asheet of paper. At the end of the class, I collected the written
conversations and graded them. In this way, if the students
wanted better grades, they had to take the practice seriously. At
the same time, I was able to see how each pair of students wasdoing even if I missed observing their conversations in class. By
providing the students with some reason (or excuse), they felt
more motivated and safer to approach the class activity with amore positive attitude.
As with the previous one, the note quoted above described mystruggle in teaching the students majoring in information sciences.
In an English communication course that I am currently teaching25

Hanakito the students majoring in British and American language andculture, I experience less difficulty in facilitating the students’ active
participations in class discussions. Those students are generally morecommitted to refining their English and seem to consider that it is “cool”
to speak English well in front of other students. However, I still needto remind the students of the sense of “being gazed at” by the teacher
occasionally in some form. For that purpose, I often ask the students towrite down how they have participated and what they have learned onthat day at the end of class. In this way, I can introduce some sense of
surveillance in class while following the learning experiences of each
student to a certain degree.
To further contemplate on this issue of “teacher’s gaze,” let us turnagain to Foucault’s (1977) powerful philosophical metaphor of “thePanopticon” (pp. 195-228). The Panopticon is a type of prison thatconsists of a hollow cylinder with an observation tower at its center.
Each prisoner is located in small cells created in the hollow cylinder.
Each cell is separated from every other and designed to face theobservation tower. Guards can observe each prisoner anytime fromsmall holes in the observation tower, while the prisoners cannot see
either the guards or the other prisoners. Sometimes, the guards might
not be observing the prisoners, but the prisoners never know whether
the guards are actually observing them or not. Consequently, theprisoners always live with a sense of being observed by the guards.
Applying Foucault’s argument to the case above, the students andthe teacher in an EFL classroom correspond respectively with theprisoners and the guard in the Panopticon. The students feel that theirclassroom activities are being gazed at by the teacher because they
have to submit a reflection paper describing what they have done thatday at the end of the class. The students know little about what the otherstudents have written on their papers. The reflection paper represents a
unidirectional correspondence between each of the students and theteacher. The teacher might closely look at each paper or just quickly
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OnCUE Journalskim over it. Regardless of this fact, each student always feels exposedto the teacher’s gaze, similar to the sense of surveillance the prisoners
experience in Panopticon. In this manner, by asking the students toreflect on their classroom experiences and submit a paper at theend of the class, the teacher could introduce a sense of pedagogicalsurveillance into EFL classrooms.

Balancing the Use of Disciplinary Power and Students’
Spontaneity
The previous sections described two illustrative cases from myteaching experiences: one concerning seat assignment and the otherconcerning reflection papers. Then, I employed Foucault’s discussions
on disciplinary power to interpret those two cases. In essence, I argued
that in order for the students to feel motivated to learn, the teacher
needed to introduce some sense of discipline in such forms as seat
assignment and reflection paper. If the balance between the sense of
discipline imposed by the teacher and the students’ spontaneity tolearn is maintained, the classroom would become an engaged learning
community where diverse ideas and opinions converse with each other(see Hanaki, 2007).
As a successful example, in the English reading class that I am
currently teaching, I ask my students to bring in one article written in
English to each class. The article can be from newspapers, magazines,
or any other publication outlets as long as it is interesting for everyone
in class (including the teacher) and relevant to the university classroom.
The topics of the reading materials range from hard social issues suchas the environment, health, crime, politics, and economics to soft
cultural issues such as fashion, music, and cooking. The significant
point here is that these topics are not provided by the teacher based on
his educational agenda but brought in by the students based on theirrespective interests. The students first read and summarize the article,
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Hanakiand then present and discuss the ideas with each other. To assist thestudents in maintaining a necessary sense of discipline, I collect thesummary of the article and reflection on the class discussions fromeach student. In this way, I maintain the balance between the sense of
discipline imposed by me as the teacher and the students’ spontaneity
to learn.
An English communication course that I am also teaching at present
might provide another successful yet more student-centered case.
This course is designed entirely as a series of students’ presentations
and subsequent discussions. Each day, two pairs of students sign up
for a presentation for 30-40 minutes. The pair is responsible for classactivities during the allocated time, and the rest of the students are
expected to actively participate in the activities. The presentation should
be as interactive as possible. The assigned pair must pose discussion
questions, offer a group task, or facilitate a debate. I observe the classinteractions and assist the presenters as necessary, but basically remain
as one of the participants in the class activities. At the end of the class, I
ask the students to write an evaluation paper to each pair of presenters
as well as a self-evaluation paper on their own participations. I collectand read all the papers. Then, I pass the evaluation papers to eachpair of presenters and return the self-evaluation papers to individual
students. In this case, my teaching role is decentralized as much as
possible to encourage the students to be responsible for their own
leaning, yet I still introduce a minimum sense of discipline.

Conclusion
Both the English reading class for sophomores and the English
communication class for juniors and seniors described above aredesigned for the students majoring in British and American language
and culture. I must admit that such radical distribution of pedagogicalresponsibilities and democratization of classroom activities might be28

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possible only given highly motivated students with sufficient English
skills. Nevertheless, I believe that these two cases demonstratesome potential of the balanced use of disciplinary power within EFL
classrooms in creating a more engaged, student-centered learning
community.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Robert Croker at Nanzan University and thereviewers and editor of OnCUE Journal for their careful reading andhelpful suggestions in the development of this manuscript.

References
Dewey, J. (1963). Democracy and education. New York: Free Press.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison.
New York: Random House.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Volume I: An
introduction. New York: Random House.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theoryof culture. In C. Geertz, The interpretation of cultures (pp. 3-30).
New York: Basic Books.
Hanaki, T. (2007). Realizing dialogic EFL classrooms: A reflection onteaching experiences in the US. The Language Teacher, 31(2), 913.

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