Investigating Teachers’ Communicative Styles in EFL Context: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective

Abstract

Deci and Ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory (SDT) postulates that autonomy-enhancing behaviors of teachers affect learners’ self-determined/autonomous motivation in learning through supporting the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Moreover, the issue of the teacher’s communicative style, including controlling versus autonomy-supportive style within self-determination theory, has been investigated in many general classroom settings, but the number of studies in EFL context is scarce. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to determine how the perceptions of the teacher as controlling or autonomy-supportive are associated with autonomous motivational regulations within self-determination theory. Increasingly, this study investigated the relationship between the subtypes of autonomy-enhancing behaviors (fostering relatedness, allowing criticism, and providing choice) and those of autonomy-suppressing behaviors (suppressing criticism, intruding, and forcing meaningless acts) of EFL teachers. To this aim, a sample population of 120 EFL learners completed the questionnaires, measuring the determined variables in the study. The findings indicated that intrinsic motivation subscale correlates with the teachers’ autonomy-supportive communicative teaching style, while learners’ perceptions of their language teacher as controlling correspond with less self-determined motivational regulations. Moreover, the results indicated that the subscales of autonomy-enhancing behaviors of teachers correlate negatively with autonomy-suppressing subscales. The findings underscore the importance of different autonomy-affecting teacher behaviors during instruction and suggest that provision of choice should not always be viewed as an indicator of autonomy support among learners. The major implication for this study is that SDT has many applications to the second language learning process as SDT describes EFL learners’ autonomous motivational regulations and the relation between teachers’ communicative style and autonomous motivational subtypes. Also, another implication for this study is that language teachers must foster relatedness during their instruction and avoid suppressing criticism if they tend to encourage self-determined motivation among EFL learners.