Research has demonstrated that teacher-dominated classroom talk is one type of unequal power discourse. That is, the teacher usually has the power to determine the topics, distribute the turns, give feedback, and ask most of questions, among other things.
Extract 1 (Long, 1980, p. 16) provides an example of teacher-controlled classroom discourse. It is based on an audio-tape of intermediate vocabulary lesson for young adult EFL students. In the extract, indented lines mean one person's turn overlapped another person's. For example, in line 24,S3 says "Jeans" when the teacher is saying "Say the ...".