Relationships among students’ perceptions of native and non-native EFL teachers’ immediacy behaviours and credibility and students’ willingness to communicate in class

ABSTRACT

The present study examined students’ perceptions of immediacy behaviours and credibility of their teachers as well as their willingness to communicate in class, in the South Korean context, with undergraduate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Participants were 252 undergraduate Korean students enrolled in a mandatory English conversation course, and they were exposed to either native or non-native English-speaking instructors. The two groups exposed to different types of teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire on teacher immediacy, credibility, student willingness to communicate in English, and self-rated English-speaking ability around the end of the semester. Results indicated that sub-components of teacher immediacy and credibility were positively and significantly correlated with each other in both groups. Further, for the participants who had native and non-native English-speaking teachers, different sub-components of teacher immediacy and credibility were found to be related to the participants’ willingness to communicate in English during class.

KEYWORDS:

• Native English-speaking teacher
• non-native English-speaking teacher
• teacher credibility
• teacher immediacy
• willingness to communicate

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and careful reading of my manuscript. I also thank the students who completed the survey for the present study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the TESOL field, there exists some criticism over the term ‘non-NEST’ (see Selvi, 2011, for an introduction to the concept), and some authors have opted to use terms such as ‘bilingual teacher’ (e.g. Lee & Macaro, 2013), which has a more positive connotation instead. Although I am familiar with this term and the controversy over its use in the TESOL field, I will use the term in this paper, as it is transparent to a wider educational audience. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this issue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jang Ho Lee

Jang Ho Lee received his DPhil in Education from the University of Oxford, and is presently an associate professor in the Department of English Education at Chung-Ang University. His areas of interest are L2 vocabulary acquisition, teachers’ code-switching in English classrooms, and developing AI-based chatbots for English teaching and learning. His work has been published in Applied Linguistics, ELT Journal, ReCALL, Language Teaching Research, Language Learning & Technology, The Modern Language Journal, TESOL Quarterly, System, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Language Awareness, among others.