A Comparison Of Power Distance Of English Teachers, Japanese Teachers And Non-Foreign Language Teachers In Classroom Communication

This study is a further verification and expansion of a study of power distance in classroom communication between English teachers and non-English teachers:a case analysis ofGuangxi Normal University (Guo,2010).(Its result has already been published in Intercultural Communication Studies, an official journal of International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies in April,2012. See Li&Guo,2012)The original research was an empirical study on the impact of the language learning on learners’value orientation. It raised two research questions:First, if learning and using a foreign language for a long time, will the value tendency of the learners’changed with the influence of culture carried by the foreign language? Second, will this change be reflected in their daily communication behaviors? The subjects of the original study were the selected English teachers and non-English teachers from Guangxi Normal University and the power distance dimension, one of the four value dimensions put forward by Hofstede was set as the dependable variable. In that study, a newly designed questionnaire was used to measure the differences of the power distance between the English teachers and the non-English teachers. Meanwhile, further classroom observations were conducted to see the effect of teachers’value orientation on their classroom communication behaviors from the following five aspects:request strategies, discourse characteristics, students’engagement, the use of humorous language and non-verbal language. The results of the original research showed that the classroom power distance of English teachers is significantly lower than that of the non-English teachers, and the difference of power distance is, indeed, caused by major, namely English teacher and non-English teacher. The result confirmed that if a person learns and uses a foreign language for a long time, his value will be influenced by the culture carried in that foreign language. The research also showed that a person’s value did have effects on his communication behaviors, while a person’s communication behaviors certainly reflected his value orientation.Based on the investigation and questionnaire of the former research, the current study tried to further verify the conclusion made by the former study by adding Japanese teachers as subjects and transferring the data collecting location to Zhejiang Gongshang University. Considering the low reliability rate of the original questionnaire, this research carried out pretest and trial tests before the formal questionnaire survey, and deleted or modified those questions whose reliability is relatively lower in the last item Cronbach’s Alpha if Item Deleted in the SPSS data results. After modification, the internal reliability of the questionnaire was increased to0.7therefore formed a new teacher’s power distance questionnaire.According to Hofstede’s summary of the power distance index of different countries (Hofstede,1991), those whose power distance from high to low are China, Japan and English-speaking countries. Therefore, the current study proposed the following hypotheses:(1) Because of the impacts of culture carried by the foreign language, there are differences on power distance among Japanese teachers, English teachers, and non-foreign language teachers.(2) The order of power distance from low to high may be English teachers, Japanese teachers and non-foreign language teachers.(3) The different power distance of teachers will lead to different behaviors when they communicate with their students in class.The results from the questionnaire survey and classroom observation of the current study verified the above three hypotheses. As a result, it further verifies that foreign language learning will influence learners’value orientation.