An Empirical Study of Teacher-Student Interaction in College English Classroom from the Perspective of Educational Equality

Abstract

Educational equality is seen as the cornerstone of social justice. Likewise, ensuring the equality of teacher-student interaction in the classroom plays a crucial part in meeting the requirements of social justice. In college English classroom, teachers are expected to provide students with equal opportunities to interact with one another through communicative and collaborative activities so as to give the full play of students’ potential. However, it is worth noting that the unequal status in current teacher-student interaction may pose serious threat to the implementation of educational equality in higher education system. Therefore, taking the 85 students of Zhejiang Yuexiu University as research participants, the study, spanning from September 2019 to January 2020, is designed to investigate the factors that influence teachers’ educational equality mindset and to assess whether the significant difference between these variables and inequality in classroom interaction exists by adopting the research instruments of classroom observation, interview and questionnaire. The data collected reveal that the inequality can be discerned in teacher-student interaction in college English classroom, for the teacher’s questioning times, question types, and feedback types are closely associated with the differences of genders, personalities, regions and English levels of students. In addition, the root causes for the inequality are also examined discreetly from multi-perspectives through interviews on both teachers and students for better proposing some effective strategies to minimize educational inequality and facilitate students’ development in positive directions in college English education.