Teachers’ notions about their communicative competencies

Abstract

IntroductionIn the everyday professional life of a teacher, quite often various conflict situations arise; these circumstances demand competent analysis and adequate solution (Leontiev, 1996; Rydanova, 1998; Zhuravlev, 1995). Foreign researchers consider the problem of communication between teachers and pupils in the context of ensuring support to pupils in the educational process (Frisby & Martin, 2010; Short, 2013; Wentzel, Battle, Russell, & Looney, 2010), of creating a favorable climate in the classroom community (Cefai & Cavioni, 2014; Patrick, Ryan, & Kaplan, 2007), and of resolving emerging conflicts (Afnan-Rizzuto, 2011; Wang et. at, 2014). In regard to the efficiency of teachers' pedagogical work, their communicative competencies substantially influences their ability to choose the most effective line of conduct in a difficult pedagogical situation (Aukhadeeva, 2006; Grekhnev, 1990). The ideas that teachers have developed regarding the lines of conduct that testify to professionalism and the communicative competencies that are required can have a great impact on teachers' behavior in pedagogical conflict situations (Glotova, 2002; Wilhelm & Glotova, 2012). Therefore, the study of teachers' ideas about effective conduct in various pedagogical situations and also about those communicative competencies that can help to resolve difficult pedagogical problems seems to be topical.MethodStudy 1ParticipantsThe project studied 196 schoolteachers divided into six age groups from 30 or younger to 51 and older.MethodThe teachers were asked to name possible conduct responses in 10 difficult pedagogical situations as viewed from two positions: that of a real and that of an ideal teacher. After that each of the teachers indicated those patterns of conduct that he/she used in each of the suggested situations. Descriptions of the situations are given below in the results and discussion section; situations 1-4 were taken from professional literature on psychology (Rean & Kolominskij, 1999).ProcedureThe teachers were asked to express their opinion about each of the situations in a free format; thus the quantity of opinions was not limited. In order to minimize the effect of the social desirability of answers, to reduce uneasiness, and to increase interest in the research poll, opinions were expressed on condition of anonymity; the teachers were asked to specify only their ages and how long they had been working as teachers. Teachers' answers were processed by a content-analysis method that allowed the unification of all sets of answers in generalized categories.After the respondents described the conduct of ideal and real teachers in 10 pedagogical situations, they were asked to say how they would personally behave in each of these situations -- that is, with which of the hypothetical teacher models they identified themselves. In each of the 10 pedagogical situations the number of the teachers who declared their personal conduct responses in a particular situation was taken as 100%. The significance of distinctions between percentages of the teachers who chose a specific conduct response was estimated by criterion (p* (Fischer's angular transformation criterion).Results and discussionThe respondents' answers were divided into 109 categories (taking into account repetition, which occurred in respect to the typical behavior of teachers in essentially different situations). In each of the 10 situations the number of conduct re-sponses, which were processed by content analysis, varied from 8 to 16. For 60 categories by criterion (p* significant differences were observed between the percentage of respondents who referred these categories mainly to the ideal and to the real (50 differences: p? 0.01; 10 differences: p? 0.05). The substantial analysis of 109 conduct responses showed that teachers' ideas about the ideal were much more positive than those about the real teacher. …