The Teacher`s Educational Style as an Important Factor of Interaction and Discourse in ELT (plenary)

Petr Dvořák & Lucie Betáková, University of South Bohemia, the Czech Republic;          Abstract: The teacher’s professional skills, mainly his/her social-psychological skills, play a crucial role in the classroom environment where foreign language teaching and learning take place. The wide range of the teacher’s social skills is reflected in his/her educational style. Wright (1987) defines educational style as a whole complex of the teacher’s attitudes and behaviour used to create best possible conditions for learning.

The paper presents findings of the research focusing on analyzing the role of the teacher’s educational style within the foreign language interactions and discourse implemented by secondary school teachers of English. The research was of a qualitative/quantitative character with the data acquired with the help of a questionnaire and a structured observation. First, the teacher-student interactions were analyzed on the basis of two dimensions forming the teacher’s educational style: the educational management and educational relationship between the teacher and the students. The second part of the research concentrated on the impact of the teacher’s educational style on the target language interaction in the classroom.

Keywords: educational style, educational relationship, educational management, interaction, classroom discourse.