right analysis and needs analysis

1. Rights Analysis: Studying
Power Relations in an
Academic Setting
Presenters :
Sona Harare

2. Needs analysis & Rights analysis
• Needs analysis has been the principal method
for determining what to include in ESP/EAP
curricula, providing descriptions of academic
skills and genres NNS students may
encounter in future courses or that they will
encounter in particular courses.
• Rights analysis examines how power is
exercised and resisted in various aspects of an
academic situation, including the pedagogy
and the curriculum.

3. Assignment evaluation in recent
studies
• Some NNS students view instructors’
guidelines as suggestions to be negotiated or
resisted rather than blueprints to be faithfully
followed.
• Some of Lekis’ subjects→ wanted “their own
best interests, placing them above the
professors’ requirements in importance”. One
of them “perceived her choice as more logical
than the assigned task”. Another found her
“interpretation to be more personally
interesting”. And the other “found hers to be a
more efficient use of her time”.

4. • Students’ varied responses to assignments
points to the inadequacy of academic genres
and skills as the sole basis of English for
academic purposes (EAP) instructions. So,
EAP courses should consider not just
assigned tasks but also multiple
interpretations of assignments by
examining how teachers
and students negotiate control in the class.

5. Rights analysis
• Rights analysis recognizes the classroom as a
site of struggle. It studies how power is
exercised and resisted in an academic setting,
aiming to reveal how struggles for power and
control can be sources of democratic
participation in life both in and outside the
classroom.
• The term “rights” highlights power relations
and theorizes EAP students as potentially active
participants rather than compliant subjects.
Rights are not a set of pre-existing demands
what a conceptual framework for questions
about authority and control.

6. Foucault's’ power
• Power, for Foucault, is the central issue of
contemporary life, provoking such questions
as:
1.
• Who makes decisions for me?
2.
• Who is preventing me from doing this
and telling me to do that?
3.
• How are these decisions on which my
life is completely articulated taken?

7. The First Day: Establishing Professorial
Authority
 Wide and shallow room
 6 rows of 10-18 desk seats bolted to the floor
 Raised platform with the instructors’ desk and
chair
 Course outline
Feedback: Students’Responses to Professorial
Authority
 Complaints
 Class discussion
 Written responses

8. Coverage control
coverage is a common concern of postsecondary teachers.
 How can we cover all the material, they ask, if we let
student talk?
 How will they learn if we do not lecture?
In this class, teacher talk was regulated by the departmental
syllabus, the textbook and the lectures (the lectures follow
the textbook, I try to elaborate and explain the textbook).

9. We recognize that you Can’t do every thing in a
one-semester course. So we just decided what
would be a basic minimum with some choices.
There weren’t really that many choices. They
[the sections] cannot differ that much.
Though Bell upheld the coverage tradition, he
recognized that it was not working well. Many
students, native and non-native, could not
keep up with the pace of the lecture. They
could not listen and take notes at the rate
required for Bell to cover all 12 topics in his
syllabus.

10. coverage
pedagogically
politically

11. Pedagogically
From a pedagogically view point, there has a
great deal of L1 and L2
research demonstrating the importance of
student talk and writing
in learning new material.
When a teachers invite students to use
expressive talk and writing to make sense of
academic concept, the students understand the
material better than if they simply listen to
lectures and textbooks.

12. Political
• Taking a political perspective, it may be that
lecturing persists because that mode of
discourse is a an expression of institutional
control over faculty and students alike. If, in
each of their course, students must
memorize large of amount of information,
there is no chance for them to challenge the
status quo.

13.  For their part, the teacher are so consumed with
covering the material that they have little time to
get to know the students, listen to their questions,
or invite them to write about and discuss the course
material.
 In other words, coverage is a control; it control both
teacher and students.
 The EAP students tried to follow that pace, using
questions to understand new concepts. Questioning
was an area of struggle over who controlled
classroom discourse and time; questions became
away for students to resist non-stop lecturing after
their requests to obtain more discussion had been
rejected.

14. Questions: negotiating power
They were into it, almost enjoying each others’
asking questions. They kind of all got into it.
One person asked question and they’d all be
behind it, be participating somehow in this
person asking a question.
During the same discussion, Bell explained that
he encouraged questions because he thought
they showed students were “thinking about
what we’re doing” and “they’re activity involved
in lecture” and because “asking and getting
answer to questions promotes more interest”.

15. Bell’s characterization of the conflict:
like students say “can you write that on the
board?” I can’t writ it. I don’t have time. If I
have to write everything, I’m really died. I don’t
like that. If someone ask me, I like do it, I don’t
like to say “no I can’t because I’m behind”. I just
feel like they’re rushed and they’re gonna get
confused. It make me uncomfortable.
Here is Ali’s explanation of the process:
I really think that in order to make it easier for
me to understand the lecture, I need some time
to capture the information. I think the question
give me time to do that. When people ask
some questions, I take my rest.

16.  Another function of questions had to do with NNS
students asserting their right to be in that classroom
and to be heard. In fact, this section of psychology
many of the EAP students participated more
comfortably than native students in both section of
psychology Bell taught, probably because they knew
each other and because the EAP class provided
support for their participation.
 A final observation about student’s questions is that
even when they were permitted, the questions were
only to be ones related directly to the material Bell
covered in his lecture. The students were not invited
to formulate questions about psychology based on
their own experience and intellectual curisity.

17. • EAP can make students aware of power
relations in academic setting to ask how
decisions about their education are made. It
can help student sort out their rights, to find
out what they are permitted to do and
whether there are possibilities for
challenging limitations. While offering
students practice in linguistic and cognitive
skills EAP can also encourage them to
question academic life and contribute to its
improvment.