A Study of the Relationship between English Teachers’ Approaches to Teaching and Students’ Incivilities

Abstract

This article aims at investigating the relationship between English instructors’ approaches to teaching and student incivilities in their classrooms. Previous studies revealed that student incivility could be influenced by variables such as class size, subject matter, and academic achievement. In this study, 137 English instructors filled in two sets of questionnaires, one probing into the instructors’ approaches to teaching and the other asking for student incivility. The results indicated that the facilitative teachers reported to have encountered fewer students’ incivilities in classrooms. The importance of this finding is that an instructor’s belief in a certain instructional school of thought can deeply influence his or her conception of students’ incivilities in a way that he or she does not even notice these incivilities in the classroom.