A Study On The Influence Of College English Teachers’ Classroom Motivating Style On Student Engagement

Student engagement is an important indicator for the assessment of teaching quality,educational experiences,and learning effectiveness.The analysis of its influencing factors has become one of the popular topics in current student engagement research.In terms of student engagement in College English classroom,few scholars have explored the influence of teachers’ classroom motivating style on students’ behavioral,emotional and cognitive engagements.And few scholars have placed students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as mediators to construct the effect mechanism of College English teachers’ classroom motivating style on student engagement.In view of the shortcomings of previous literature,this study surveyed and interviewed the College English teachers and non-English major freshmen and sophomores from two universities of Shandong Province.With the collected data about teachers’ classroom motivating style,students’ language learning motivation and engagement in College English classroom,this study aimed to investigate the correlational paths between teachers’ autonomy-supportive,mixed,and controlling classroom motivating styles and the three dimensions of student engagement,and then to construct a two-factor mediation model of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to probe into the effect mechanism of teachers’ classroom motivating style on student engagement.Further,the mediating effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and the comparison on their effect sizes were to be tested in this model.The results showed that teachers’ autonomy-supportive,mixed and controlling classroom motivating styles all positively predicted students’ behavioral,emotional and cognitive engagements.This results indicated that these three kinds of classroom motivating styles,being the influencing factors of student engagement,could positively predict student engagement.The results of mediating effect testing revealed that the three kinds of teachers’ classroom motivating styles not only directly affected student engagement,they also indirectly influenced student engagement through the mediations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.Moreover,students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations exerted their significant yet not identical mediating effects in each correlational path.The mediating effect of intrinsic motivation wielded in the correlation between autonomy-supportive motivating style and student engagement was significantly higher than that of extrinsic motivation,which indicated that students could improve their intrinsic motivation through teachers’ autonomy-support,and further deepen their engagement.The mediating effect of extrinsic motivation produced in the relationship between controlling motivating style and student engagement was significantly higher than that of intrinsic motivation,which evidenced that teachers with controlling motivating style tended to regulate students’ motivation by external rules.And they stimulated student engagement by effectively transforming the external rules into the self-important values of students during the teaching process.However,the difference on the mediating effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations was found to be insignificant in the relationship between teachers’ mixed motivating style and student engagement,which demonstrated that teachers with mixed motivating styles promoted the development of students’ intrinsic motivation by satisfying their basic psychological needs to a certain extent.At the same time,teachers also strengthened students’ extrinsic motivation by external rules and evaluation.It made students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations develop in a balanced way,and jointly promote student engagement in the College English classroom.The construction of the effect mechanism of College English teachers’ classroom motivating style on student engagement provided some implications for College English teaching.Meanwhile,this study also has some limitations.The future research can make up for its deficiencies by expanding the samples,and by employing a longitudinal research design.