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Abstract
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Unbalanced power relations among students were observed in EFL Classrooms in private institutes. Somcommunicating, they were rudely interrupted and were given malicious names by the dominant students. The classroom was divided into four groups, dominant groups who controlled the others, submissive students that avoided disobedience from dominant groups, resistant students who tried to resist the bullying practices of dominant groups and new comers that were regarded as strangers with the established power relations within students in the classroom.
Dominant students were intolerant of listening to other student’s communicative interactions and disrespected their opinions in class by ridiculing them. Whenever other students were succeeding in doing communicative tasks, they were given malevolent comments by the dominant students and were called bootlickers and etc. verbal bullying sometimes aroused resistant students’ anger which resulted in verbal conflicts and fights in male classrooms. Furthermore, some resistant students as a way of showing their anger increased their participation in communicative interactions to resist the verbal bullying.
Teachers in some cases gave contemptuous looks to inactive students who were the victims of Verbal bullies. Victims of bullies couldn’t participate properly in communicative interactions; hence, they were regarded as indolent students by the teachers and teachers never related their weak performances with established unfair power relations in the classroom. Consequently; students were suffering from the practices of verbal bullies practiced both by the students and teachers.
According to Van Lire’s theory, student bullying occurs when topic and activity is controlled by the teacher. Van Lire (1988) classified the classroom interaction according to whether teacher controls the topic and activity. Teachers controlled the interactions among students by giving them ambiguous topics and tasks which created a panic among them and r
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