The Impact Of Teacher Expectations On Students' Academic Self-Concept: An Empirical Study In College English Classroom

Teacher expectations are inferences that teachers make of the future behavior or academic achievement of their students on the basis of what they know about these students at present. To date, extensive research abroad has identified teacher expectations as an important variable in accounting for variation in student achievement and performance. However, only a few has been conducted to explore the impact that teacher expectations have on students' other attributes (such as self-concept, achievement motivation). Moreover, researchers in this field at home have almost focused on the elaboration of teacher expectation effect as well as its implications for teaching, but strikingly few empirical studies has been done on the links between teacher expectations and student attributes. Therefore, this paper has been an attempt to explore the relationship between teacher expectations and students' academic self-concept.Based on the theory of teacher expectation effect in pedagogy, the research aims to investigate whether a teacher's inappropriate expectations toward students can be improved through teacher training, and whether the improvement of teacher expectations helps to enhance students' academic self-concept. Besides, it attempts to find and discuss some implications for teachers so as to make use of positive teacher expectations to facilitate students' learning.A sample of 145 college EFL freshmen and 2 English teachers from a college in Hunan province was adopted as the research participants. One teacher was randomly chosen for the intervention program and received TESA-based training, and the students taught by this teacher were identified as the experimental group, whereas the students taught by the other teacher who was kept unknown of the training were identified as the control group. The study lasted for three months with data collected regarding the students' perspectives on both their homeroom English teacher's expectations toward them and their academic self-concept on the subject of English by means of questionnaires, classroom observations and interview. Both questionnaires were administered to the student participants before and after the intervention.The results of the study reveal that the experimental group has perceived significantly more expectations from their English teacher who received TESA-based training than the control group does. Accordingly, the mean score of the experimental group students on academic self-concept is significantly higher than that of the control group students. Therefore, both quantitative and qualitative analyses enabled the author of this thesis to conclude that the teacher's inappropriate expectations toward students can be improved through teacher training, and the improvement of teacher expectations helps to enhance students' academic self-concept.The findings from the study have wider implications for college English teachers to make use of positive teacher expectation effect as a purposeful pedagogical tool to facilitate students' learning. They also provide valid and reliable information for teacher training administration which is supposed to be necessary to elicit effective teaching.