This article discusses how participants in a foreign language class negotiate instances of power and manage the constraints embedded in the discourse of a textbook. The aim is to analyse the manner in which teacher and students collaboratively set up a participation locus that is less dependent on institutional and social norms. Because the interactive space of the classroom is an environment in which power relationships become explicit, I am especially concerned with how the students (who are all Chinese beginner-level learners of Portuguese) deal with the limitations imposed by their textbook discourse and negotiate with their teacher new ways of participation that enable them to have a more decisive voice in the class. I take a microanalytical perspective to analyse the actions that participants (teacher and students) perform to contest for power and create a flexible order of local rank that contrasts with the more stable notion of institutional rank imposed by school norms. The results show that active participation by students, with the collaboration of their teacher, challenges the conventional image of passiveness that is often attributed to Chinese learners.