Teacher Access and Mentoring Abilities: Predicting the Outcome Value of Extra Class Communication

Reasoning from Sunnafrank's theory of predicted outcome value (POV), this investigation examined how students' assessments of their teachers' accessibility and mentoring abilities influenced their perceptions of the predicted value of engaging in extra class communication (ECC). Student perceptions of teacher physical and social accessibility, along with teacher mentoring abilities (including career, course, and psychosocial), were all substantially and positively related to students' ratings of the POV of ECC. However, only social accessibility, course mentoring, and career mentoring emerged as significant predictors of POV in the regression model. These findings validate POV theory by confirming that students readily assess what they have to gain (or lose) from potential ECC encounters based on what their teachers can offer them. These findings are discussed with regard to understanding how students may be motivated to realize the benefits of ECC.     

Discourse Roles,Gender and Language Textbook Dialogues: Who learns what from John and Sally?

ABSTRACT Much work has been done on gender stereotyping in textbooks for foreign language teaching. However, little has focused on the language of dialogues, which are a characteristic feature of language textbooks. In the light of this gap, this article describes the author's own study analysing discourse roles in dialogues in three recent text books for the teaching of English as a foreign language. The results showed an encouraging level of gender fairness. The authors then explore whether this fairness was achieved through the creation of gender balance in social and occupational roles, and suggest that this was so in the case of these three books. They also discuss the negative implications of gender-imbalanced dialogues for female students + language practice opportunities. This study has implications for language teachers, teacher educators, and writers and publishers of language teaching materials.