Studies in Higher Education Vol. 35, No.

5, August 2010, 505512

Speech-act theory as a new way of conceptualizing the student experience

Andrew Fisher*
Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
andrew.fisher@nottingham.ac.uk Dr 0000002009 00 AndrewFisher Society Article 2009 Originalfor Research 0307-5079 Francis into Studies in (print)/1470-174X 10.1080/03075070903118039 CSHE_A_411976.sgm Higher Education Taylor andHigher Education (online)

This article has four aims. The first is to characterize the key features of speechact theory, and, in particular, to show that there is a genuine distinction between the sound uttered when someone is speaking (locution), the effect the speech has (perlocution) and the very act of speaking (the illocution). Secondly, it aims to demonstrate that illocutionary speech-acts are an integral part of higher education, and thirdly, to specify the conditions under which agents are unable to perform certain speech-acts. Finally, the article argues that these conditions can be found within higher education, and hence students and lecturers are often unable to perform certain speech-acts. It is not the aim of this article to suggest that silencing and power, understood in this way, is an exhaustive conceptual tool kit for understanding the student experience. It is not. However, such a way of conceptualizing the student experience may have some interesting and novel, explanatory and prescriptive, payoff. Keywords: speech-act theory; student experience; silencing; power; freedom of expression

Introduction
Typically [the teachers] enter their classrooms looking at the section meeting or tutorial as an opportunity for the students to develop initiative and scope in their own thinking. No sooner do the students get started, however, and some error or inexactness is voiced, than the older form of responsibilities imposes on the instructor the imperative of correcting. In the hours where this tendency gets into motion, three to five corrections of this kind appear sufficient to defeat the students initiative for search and the flow of their exploration. The initiative for conversation then falls back upon the instructor, who then finds himself in a monologue or lecture, with the sensation of being somehow trapped, compelled, by powerful forces in himself and in the students, to do what he had never intended to do. (Perry 1999, 237, emphasis added)

Talk of the student experience is widespread. A quick survey of higher educational institutions reveals, amongst other things: MA courses discussing the student experience, Pro-Vice-Chancellors of the student experience, and, of course, a general move to try to improve student experience ratings through surveys such as the UKs National Student Survey. However, how are we to understand this nebulous notion? This article makes a tentative suggestion about one way we may do this. It suggests that we can think of the speech used by students and practitioners in higher education as action, and that we can use this speech-act account to conceptualize the student experience.
*Email: andrew.fisher@nottingham.ac.uk
ISSN 0307-5079 print/ISSN 1470-174X online 2010 Society for Research into Higher Education DOI: 10.1080/03075070903118039 http://www.informaworld.com

506

A. Fisher

One thing the article suggests is that, because speech requires certain enabling conditions for it to be action, if these conditions are not present, then even if words are uttered, the speech is disabled. Moreover, the article suggests that if action is related to power, then when students and practitioners are silenced they are disempowered. So, if the enabling conditions for speech are missing, powerlessness is present. The disabling of these conditions can occur unintentionally. So, even if institutions value notions like freedom of expression, they still could be unintentionally censoring their students and removing their power; and, as such, radically changing their experience. Speech-act theory Austin (1955) highlighted a conceptual gap in the understanding of speech. Not only do we utter words, what he calls locutions, but we also act with our speech. These acts he categorizes as perlocutionary and illocutionary. Of these two, the former is relatively easy to understand. We utter certain words in order that they bring about certain effects. If I shout fore on a golf course, then this will cause people to duck; if the barman shouts last orders in a pub this will mean a large crowd forms around the bar, etc. So our speech can be described in terms of the simple sounds omitted (locutions), and as an act to bring about various consequences (perlocutions). However, and this is Austins key insight, speech can be thought of as an act in-andof itself. This is what he calls illocution. The easiest way to show what Austin means is through a number of examples. If a man dressed in black on a football pitch shows a player a yellow card, then he has warned the player. If a vicar says, I now pronounce you man and wife in a church, then he has married the couple. These are examples of acts warning and marrying. Initially this distinction may seem superficial, yet on careful inspection there is a genuine difference. Consider another example from Saul:
Suppose George W Bush appears on TV and utters the words I hereby resign. This act may have many perlocutionary effects. The perlocutionary acts might include making Democrats happy, making Republicans nervous, shocking the world, and selling lots of newspapers. There is just one illocutionary act, however, and this is the act simply of resigning the presidency of the United States. Like many other acts, not just anyone can perform it. (Saul 2003, 86, emphasis added)

There are a number of accounts of how best to understand illocution. However, for the sake of argument, I will not only assume that illocution makes sense, I will borrow Hornsbys (1994) useful characterization. Hornsby suggests that other accounts explaining illocution have been on the whole obscure, reliant on doubtful tests and over-dependent on the notion of convention. For instance, consider an account that tries to explain illocution in terms of consequences alone. This is problematic. Consequences seem to be as much a part of the picture when we consider illocutions as when we consider perlocutions. Consider, for example, warning, which is an illocution. For someone to successfully warn someone there will necessarily be certain consequence(s), such as that they are warned. So, according to Hornsby, to demarcate illocution, focusing on consequences is not sufficient. There is then a danger of losing the distinction between illocution and perlocution altogether, and our project will fall at the first hurdle. However, Hornsby suggests a plausible way to proceed. We should not rely on linguistic tests, consequence or

Studies in Higher Education

507

convention. The key to understanding illocution is reciprocity. If I warn someone an illocutionary speech-act then what does there need to be for this to take place? Well, it seems that what is required is simply certain receptiveness on the audiences part, i.e. that the audience takes me to have said what I meant. Reciprocity is the condition under which people can recognize one anothers speech as it is meant to be taken. Such a background of reciprocity allows for Hornsby (1994, 194) to stipulate a working definition of illocution. Let us consider an example to illustrate this definition. Imagine we are trying to work out whether the mathematics teacher asserting that 2 + 2 = 4 is an illocutionary act. According to Hornsby, it is if (and only if) the conditions are right. The conditions are right if they allow the class to take the teacher to be asserting 2 + 2 = 4. If these conditions are not in place, then asserting 2 + 2 = 4 in this context is not an illocutionary act. Teaching and student interactions as illocutionary acts The second premise of my argument the first being the plausibility of the illocution/ perlocution distinction is that teaching and student interactions can be usefully thought of as involving illocutionary acts. I suggest such a claim is relatively uncontroversial. Claiming that teaching involves illocutionary acts is actually more likely to be challenged as trivial. So, can we be more specific? Not without encountering an obvious problem: to give a full account of how teaching can involve illocution we need an account of teaching. If, for instance, we take teaching to mean roughly the process of standing and speaking to students, then to teach can be substituted with, say, assertion or declaring, and teaching can involve illocutionary speech-acts. However, we need not get into a debate about how to best understand teaching. For even with a very broad definition that takes in the main prima facie competing views i.e. that teaching involves imparting both knowledge how and knowledge that then both involve illocution. Moreover, if we can make sense of illocution, and if we grant that teachers perform many illocutionary speech-acts, then surely students perform many speech-acts; for instance, asking a question, disagreeing with an issue, asserting a proposition, stating a worry. And, as such, we can assert the truth of both parts of our second main claim: that students use illocutionary speech-acts in the higher education context. Thus, using Hornsbys definition, we can see that there can be a meaningful and understandable way of carving up speech-acts so that illocution is a useful notion. Moreover, I have suggested that it is relatively uncontroversial that, in the lecture theatre, seminar room and classroom, etc., there are many illocutionary acts performed by both lecturers and students. Of course, the pressing question is, so what? Silencing If a university student persists in making a noise then we can silence her by means of a simple gag (locutionary silencing). And although there may have been cases where students have been gagged (though I know of none!), the overt nature of such an action would soon rightfully bring the condemnation of students, lecturers and other university staff. Even if it were the case that some lecturers in their darkest moments may have wished to gag students, none would. And, even if in their darkest moments students

508

A. Fisher

may have wished this on their peers and the lecturer, they wouldnt do it. A general presupposition of higher education is that, not only is the freedom of expression an essential right of the student within the classroom, it is a necessary condition by which he or she can develop. The ability to be heard within the university context is, it seems, a minimum requirement of any worthwhile student experience. Perlocutionary silencing is, however, common. A student may aim to persuade someone of the correctness of their metaphysical position, and if they succeed this will be a perlocutionary act. However, if they fail because the lecturer puts forward a contrary, much more eloquent and sophisticated argument, then the student would have been prevented in performing their perlocution. One can think of many examples where the student is frustrated in their aim. There is nothing too troubling about this, though of course how the perlocution fails could be analysed as problematic. This, for instance, may be a way of understanding the practice of bullying. However, what is key in this article is illocutionary silencing. There is recognition that students want to be, and need to be, heard; and that there is a willingness and desire to facilitate the student voice in higher education. It seems odd, then, and initially inexplicable, that students often feel silenced (e.g. Fielding 2004). Why should this be? In particular, why should this be if no one wants it? What is going wrong? This is where the conceptual framework that has been sketched here comes into its own. The speech-act theory gives us a way of explaining how people of good will, committed to freedom of expression, can still end up perpetuating a system in which students and lecturers are silenced. The space for this as a genuine option opens up when it is appreciated that, just as there is silencing at the perlocutionary and the locutionary level, there is also silencing at the illocutionary level. So, if teaching and student interactions involve illocutionary acts, and illocutionary acts can be silenced, then teaching and student interactions can be silenced in a way which is significantly distinct from perlocutionary and locutionary silencing. If this is the case, what this means is that we have another level of understanding the student experience. Readers familiar with arguments in feminism will see the link here to discussions of pornography and censorship (Langton 1993). The key to supporting and developing this is to understand more about illocutionary silencing. Here is a famous example from Davidson:
Imagine this: the actor is acting a scene in which there is supposed to be a fire It is his role to imitate as persuasively as he can a man who is trying to warn others of a fire. Fire! he screams. And perhaps he adds, at the behest of the author, I mean it! Look at the smoke! etc. And now a real fire breaks out, and the actor tries vainly to warn the real audience. Fire! he screams, I mean it! Look at the smoke! (2001, 269)

In such a case the actor has been illocutionary silenced; he fails to warn. It is not merely that the audience understood and failed to run for their lives (perlocutionary silenced), or that someone put him behind a soundproof screen (locutionary silenced). The situation was such that, whatever the actor did, the conditions were not in place for him to be able to perform the act of warning that there was a fire. Here is another example:
To utter the words mutallaqa, mutallaqa, mutallaqa is to perform the illocutionary act of divorce in a country where Islamic law is in force, provided certain conditions are met. Pronounced by a husband to his wife, it is an act of divorce. Not so if it is

Studies in Higher Education

509

pronounced by the wife to her husband. No matter how hard she tries, a woman cannot succeed in divorcing her spouse by making that or any relevantly similar utterance. Divorce of that kind is an act that is unspeakable for women. (Saul 2003, 317, emphasis added)

So what has happened? The actor and woman genuinely mean what they say, yet the acts of divorce and warning cannot take place. In such cases, warning and divorce was not simply ignored or frustrated, it was disabled. The actor and woman have been silenced. What is it about these examples that make them cases of illocutionary silencing? The conditions were not in place for the audience, or the man, to take the actor or woman to be warning or divorcing. To put it in terms of the proceeding sections, reciprocity was not in place. Also, notice something else which accompanies this discussion. One way of understanding powerlessness is as the inability to perform the speech-act that one would otherwise perform. So, another way of understanding the silencing process above is that the actor and woman are powerless because they are unable to perform the act of divorce and the act of warning with their words. They are in situations where reciprocity is not in place because of the power relations. Thus, not having authority in a relevant domain can disable a speaker from performing illocutionary acts. And authority is something which is dependent on reciprocity. To sum things up thus far: the environment can be such that reciprocity is not in place. This means the speaker lacks the power to perform certain acts with their speech. This in turn means they are silenced. But they are silenced not because someone is actively stopping them talking, or is refusing to act on their requests, but because of the environment itself. Let us then turn our attention to higher education and the student experience.

Some tentative examples of how the lecturer/student can be illocutionary silenced I think the speech-act theory approach is useful, and that the notion of illocutionary silencing can give a theoretical explanation and understanding to the empirical claim that the promulgation of a demeaning view of a group has rendered members of that group relatively powerless parties in communicated exchanges (Hornsby 1994, 200). I am more tentative, however, about the following real-life examples. Crucially though, if the examples are less than convincing, I do not believe that this in itself should make us sceptical about the explanatory weight of the speech-act framework in higher education. I hope that one consequence of this article of highlighting illocutionary silencing in higher education is that scholars in this field will use it as a new way of conceptualizing and understanding the complex student/lecturer dynamic. It is a hypothesis I hold out to be tested. That said, I believe we can start to put some flesh on the bare conceptual bones.

Example 1: silencing the lecturer One area in which the lecturer could be silenced is in their encouraging of studentcentred learning. Obviously, some lecturers are not converts to this approach, but assume for the sake of argument that they are, and that they are trying to convince and encourage the students of its benefits. The lecturer may encounter this sort of response from the students:

510

A. Fisher

The students, whose teachers have been telling them everything they needed to know from [year one], dont necessarily appreciate having this support suddenly withdrawn. Some students view the approach as a threat or as some kind of game, and a few may become sullen or hostile when they find they have no choice about playing Good lecturers may feel awkward when they start using student-centered methods and their course-end ratings may initially drop. Its tempting for instructors to give up in the face of all that, and many unfortunately do. (Felder and Brent 1996, 44, emphasis added)

What the notion of illocutionary silencing provides is an explanation for such an empirical claim. Silencing is reliant on the correct power relations, which in turn are dependent on reciprocity. Put crudely, not having authority in a relevant domain can disable a speaker from performing illocutionary acts. One way of analysing the above scenario is that the power shifts from the lecturer to the student without the students being aware of the shift in power. Student-centred instruction is disabled students see themselves as powerless to control their learning. As such, there is no reciprocity and possible uptake for the conventions of learning, and hence the illocutionary act is disabled. This way of conceptualizing what is going on can help us understand the comments about the students seeing this approach as some kind of game; for, after all, games have conventions. Crucially, what the lecturer needs to say to convey the student centered learning instruction is unspeakable. This is because the presumption and understanding of what education is and how to play the game correctly corrupts reciprocity, and hence the enabling conventions, which are needed in order for the lecture to perform certain speech acts. It should then be unsurprising that its tempting for instructors to give up in the face of all that, and many unfortunately do. Example 2: silencing the students In a recent article, Mann (2001) talks about alienation. I have a number of problems with the arguments it presents. For instance, there is no clear underlying mechanism that explains or helps track the alienation or estrangement of the student. There is no argument to the presumed end that alienation is in itself a bad thing. Moreover, if Mann is right, and the university is now focused on surface learning and superficial assessment-based approaches, then arguably the ideal student experience ought to be one of alienation and estrangement. However, why I raise Manns article here is that the speech-act approach gives us a way of showing why alienation/estrangement is bad. It is bad because it is brought about by one group/institution stopping another group acting freely. And, on the face of it, acting freely is something worth preserving. It certainly sounds to me like a categorical imperative. My claim is that the speech-act framework can give a more secure and I happen to think convincing conceptual grounding to such notions as estrangement and alienation. Mann gives an example of alienation/estrangement:
the person who registers as a student in a higher education institution enters a pre-existing discoursal world in which they are positioned in various ways and in which more powerful others have greater facility, knowledge and understanding of higher education discursive practices the student, by entering the new land of the academy, can be said to be estranged both from this new land, but also from their own language, culture and desire. (Mann 2001, 10, 12, emphasis added)

Can we go any deeper than this in our explanation? I think so. The student starting to engage with the particular type of university speech is in a position such that there

Studies in Higher Education

511

is no reciprocity, and hence no framework for the enabling conventions for certain illocutionary speech-acts. Moreover, the more powerful members of the university make it impossible for some students, in some contexts, to do things with their words. The students are rendered powerless and alienated. They become estranged from their own language, as Mann puts it; although they can make sounds with their speech, and they think they know what they are saying, their ability to act to convey meaning is disabled. They are unable to communicate in this new land of academia in the same way the actor fails to warn of the danger, and the woman fails to divorce. So, although there is no desire to silence and hence alienate/estrange, the system and language itself, with the accompanying breakdown of reciprocity between the institution and the student, silences and alienates and estranges the student. There is, of course, much more work to be done expanding and developing this notion of analytic speech-act theory in higher education. In particular, it would be good to take a closer look at the notion of reciprocity and power. It would also be beneficial to move beyond my tentative examples, and to use this framework as a way of interpreting and analysing real-life case studies. Finally, it would be useful to ask how we might counter the silencing. In other words, what systems could be put in place to facilitate reciprocity and empower students and lecturers?

Conclusion I have shown that we can usefully discuss illocution as distinct from perlocution using Hornsbys analysis. I have demonstrated that illocutionary speech-acts are an integral part of the higher education context, and that reciprocity is an essential condition for illocutionary speech-acts to take place. I have discussed how silencing can happen at the locutionary, perlocutionary and illocutionary level, and how illocutionary silencing can take place despite the best intentions of the people involved. Finally, I have put forward two tentative examples which start to show how lecturers and students could be illocutionary silenced. If this analysis is correct it explains why it is that, even though those in higher education recognize and respect the right to freedom of expression, students and lecturers are still silenced. For it is the way language is used, and by whom, which makes it the case that certain groups of people in various educational contexts find what they want to say unspeakable. Acknowledgements
Thanks to Dr Monica Mclean and Professor Melanie Walker for useful comments and clarifications.

References
Austin, J.L. 1955. How to do things with words: The William James lectures, ed. J.O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davidson, D. 2001. Inquiries into truth and interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Felder, R., and R. Brent. 1996. Navigating the bumpy road to student-centered instruction. College Teaching 44: 437. Fielding, M. 2004. Transformative approaches to student voice: Theoretical underpinnings, recalcitrant realities. British Educational Research Journal 30, no. 2: 295311. Hornsby, J. 1994. Illocution and its significance. In Foundations of speech act theory: Philosophical and linguistic perspectives, ed. S.L. Tsohatzidis. London: Routledge.

512

A. Fisher

Langton, R. 1993. Speech acts and unspeakable acts. Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, no. 4: 293330. Mann, S. 2001. Alternative perspectives on the student experience: Alienation and engagement. Studies in Higher Education 26, no. 1: 719. Perry, W. 1999. Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Saul, J. 2003. Feminism: Issues and arguments. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Copyright of Studies in Higher Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.