Teacher-Student Interpersonal Relationships in Chinese Secondary Education Classrooms

Abstract

Positive interpersonal relationships between teacher and students contribute to students’ affective school experiences and outcomes, and such productive relationships are created through teacher moment-to-moment interpersonal behaviour in class. Previous studies on teacher-student interpersonal relationships, especially concerning teacher moment-to-moment interpersonal behaviours, have mainly been carried out in Western educational contexts. Therefore, the current PhD thesis aims to investigate if the interpersonal framework of teacher-student relationships can be used in the East Asian context, more specifically, secondary classrooms in the Chinese context. This PhD thesis consists of four studies. Study 1 developed a contextualized adaption of the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI), i.e., the Chinese instrument to measure students’ interpersonal perceptions of their teacher. This Chinese version was developed by considering language and cultural embeddedness, which transcended a narrow view of instrument adaptation to another culture as mere translation. The questionnaire appeared to be reliable and indications for validity also were found. Study 2 and 3 assessed the relevance of teacher interpersonal behaviour for students’ affective variables, i.e., academic emotions, achievement goals and behavioural engagement in the Chinese context. The findings indicated that although teacher warmth and friendliness appeared to be a more important predictor than teacher dominance and control, teacher dominance should not be discarded as an antecedent of affective variables and in addition, dominance contributes to the effect of teacher warmth. Study 4 investigated how Chinese teachers with, as judged by their students, a positive interpersonal relationship behave interpersonally from moment to moment. This study found that Chinese teachers showed rather frequent dominant and friendly moment-to-moment behaviour and these behaviour were perceived to be rather stable and only to be shifting between rather similar friendly and agentic behaviours. Dutch teachers were found to exhibit larger changes in their moment-to-moment behaviour patterns than Chinese. Considering the findings in this thesis, it appears to be worthwhile to apply the framework of teacher-student interpersonal relationships into the Chinese context. Overall, the results are largely comparable with previous findings on the interpersonal framework in western samples, however the results also show that it is important for researchers to be aware that there are limitations to generalizability of Western results over cultural contexts, such as the East Asian classroom, and vice versa. In the Chinese context one should especially keep in mind the probable different functioning of teacher agency: teacher agentic or dominant behaviour may play a more important role in building a positive teacher-student interpersonal relationship in an East Asian classroom than in a Western context. Future research may consider conducting longitudinal studies with at least two or three measurement occasions to eventually draw firmer conclusions regarding the associations tested in this research. These might also include observation of student interpersonal behaviour to see how moment-to-moment teacher-student interactions unfold in different cultural contexts.