The ability of a person or a group to influence opinions, values, and behaviour of others is one of the most studied phenomena in social sciences (for example Simmel, 1896; Weber, 1922; Foucault, 1975). Thinking through this McCroskey's (2006) definition of power, the importance of this phenomenon for educational and instructional settings is obvious. The latest research supports our view by showing that the realisation of instructional aims is enabled by clearly established power relationships in classes (Šalamounová & Švaříček, 2012). This supports Bernstein's (1996) theory of dominance of regulative instructional discourse while the didactic discourse constitutes a part of the regulative one. Power negotiation and use of power is understood as an inherent part of educational process (McCroskey & Richmond, 1983; Šeďová, 2011). The most influential, traditional typology of power as a relational phenomenon comes from French & Raven (1960). They distinguish teacher's power in relation to a (by students perceived) principle on which it is based on, i.e. coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, and expert power. This typology developed during the years and was precised. Nevertheless, main instruments measuring power were based on this original typology with five main power bases (i. e. Schrodt, Witt, & Turman, 2007). Most of the studies conducted with questionnaires based on this typology focused on tertiary students and teachers. The most often used power as perceived by students seems to be coercive power, followed by legitimate and expert power; the least used were reward and reference power (Jamieson, 1974). The use of specific power bases (i. e. reference and expert power) is positively correlated with student's cognitive and affective learning (Richmond & McCroskey, 1984). Elias (1992) found that students perceived as inappropriate the use of so called harsh power mechanisms and reported discomfort when they were applied. On the other hand the expert power was perceived as the best by students. Other studies reported also relation of teacher's power and student's motivation (Richmond, 1990) or their inappropriate behaviour (Myers, 1999; Tauber, 1999). No influence of teacher's gender on student's perception of their power was found (Elias & Mace Britton, 2005). The relevance of these findings needs to be further supported with findings on different samples, i. e. above all on younger students and in different socio-cultural contexts.

In accordance to these findings and needs of further theory development, we adapted one of the latest and most used instruments measuring relational power of teachers – Teacher Power Use Scale (Schrodt, Witt, & Turman, 2007). This regarded the adaptation for younger students (i. e. not university but lower secondary level) and to the Czech sociocultural conditions. Our aim was to test the above mentioned theory and findings on different data and come up with results about Czech sociocultural context as well because there was not enough information about teacher's power bases available in the Czech Republic.

Teacher Power Use Scale (Schrodt, Witt, & Turman, 2007) is based on French and Raven's (1960) typology ofpower (i.e.,coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, andexpert). TPUS consists of 30 items on a 7-point Likert scale. TPUS showed better psychometric properties than previously preferred Perceived Power Measure by McCroskey and Richmond (1983) and Roach's (1995) Power Base Measure. TPUS demonstrated better internal reliability, concurrent and discriminant validity, and it contained more valid and reliable indicators for the five power bases (coefficient of reliability Cronbach's alpha ranges between .77 to .90). TPUS was better in measuring of so called anti-social forms of power (coercive and legitimate) and pro-social forms of power (referent and reward) at the aggregated level.

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