A Questionnaire Research On Students’ Evaluation Of Teachers: Based On RICE Principles

In order to improve teaching quality, teachers must focus on students’ feelings, helpthem develop comprehensively and respect their principal position in teaching activities.As important participants of teaching activities, students have the most direct feelingsabout teachers’ teaching. If teachers are able to know about how students feel about andhow they evaluate their performances, they could know their teaching strengths andshortages. As a result, they could make changes and improve their teaching quality.In2012, Professor Rose Senior proposed the “RICE” principles at the TESOLInternational Conference. These principles represented the fundamental trends in currentlanguage teaching, and were followed by a lot of language teachers in their dailyteaching. However, no researcher in language teaching field in China has tested thepractices of these principles. Therefore, it is necessary to test whether language teachersin China are practicing “RICE” principles from student’s angle.Through the investigation of the questionnaire, which was designed on the basis of“RICE” principles and requires students to evaluate their college English teachers, thispaper aims to test to what extent do college English teachers in Chongqing Universityhad followed the requirements of “RICE” principles. According to the explanations ofProfessor Senior, this paper also designed a set of questionnaire which contains fourparts and37items in total, to judge teachers’ performances. The5-Likert scale was usedto assess how those items fit the feelings of students.450freshmen in ChongqingUniversity filled in the questionnaire and446of them are effective. Relevant dataanalysis softwares were used to make descriptive analysis, ANOVA, exploratory factoranalysis and so on.Results show that “RICE” principles are generally used principles which are alsoapplied in foreign language teaching practices in China. College English teachers inChongqing University followed the requirements of “RICE” principles well. The resultsof the Exploratory Factor Analysis showed that the scores of each principle wereaffected by different factors. Individual differences will affect students’ evaluation ofteachers in varying degrees. In addition, freshmen in Chongqing University aregenerally not confident enough about their English levels. Some students hold negativeattitudes toward English learning.According to what have been discussed above, it is practical for teachers to fully respect students’ principal position and focus on students’ feelings about teachers andclassroom teaching. Teachers should accordingly improve their teaching quality andachieve sustainable development of their major. Chongqing University shouldpopularize “RICE” principles among language teachers on the one hand, and strengthentheir advantages on the other hand, thus optimize their language teaching.