Teachers matter: expectancy effects in Chinese university English-as-a-foreign-language classrooms

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate teacher expectation effects for intact student groups (rather than individuals) in tertiary settings, which have been little studied in the literature. The participants were 50 teachers and their 4617 first-year undergraduate students learning English as a foreign language at two universities in China. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was employed for data analysis and the major findings were: (1) class-level teacher expectations had significant effects on student year-end academic achievement; (2) teachers who held high (or low) expectations for all students in one class, held high (or low) expectations for all their classes and (3) teacher-level expectancies had significant effects on student academic achievement after one school year. This study provided evidence that the contextual factors of tertiary education and curriculum areas may contribute to salient teacher expectation effects. Furthermore, the findings add weight to the argument that teacher expectation effects are a function of teacher beliefs rather than student factors.

Keywords:

• teacher expectations
• teacher expectation effects
• higher education
• foreign language learning
• student achievement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number SWU1509175].