Speaking Power into Being: Figurative Language, Authority, and Student Agency in EFL Classrooms

Abstract

This study examines how figurative and nonliteral language mediates power in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. It focuses on how lecturers use metaphor, analogy, ambiguity, hyperbole, rhetorical questions, contrast, and register shifting to explain content, evaluate understanding, correct behavior, and shape lecturer-student relationships. A secondary qualitative analysis was conducted on 18 archived semi-structured interviews involving three lecturers and fifteen students in an English Education Program at an Indonesian university. A hybrid inductive-deductive thematic analysis combined data-driven coding with sensitizing concepts from language-and-power theory. Coding moved from recurrent expressions to interpretive codes, themes, and a conceptual model. Five themes were generated: contextual figurative scaffolding; ambiguity as productive challenge and epistemic gatekeeping; hyperbolic correction as disciplinary power and face threat; register shifting as relational power; and negotiated student agency under proficiency-sensitive conditions. Figurative language was productive when it connected abstract material to students' lives and invited interpretation, but restrictive when ambiguity exceeded students' linguistic resources or when hyperbole was used to shame. All students valued simplified explanation when comprehension failed, all evaluated analogy positively, and nearly all rejected excessive corrective language. Lecturers should use figurative language as calibrated scaffolding rather than as an unmarked test of intelligence. Analogies should be contextualized, ambiguity should be followed by clarification, correction should target the task rather than the learner's identity, and formal-informal register shifts should be used strategically to balance academic legitimacy with approachability. The article proposes a Figurative Power Cycle showing how linguistic form becomes pedagogical, epistemic, disciplinary, or relational power and how student responses feed back into lecturers' subsequent choices. The model positions figurative language not merely as ornament or vocabulary content, but as a mechanism through which authority and participation are negotiated in EFL interaction.