Exploring the Relationship Between Teacher Confirmation and Student Motivation: The United States and Finland

Teacher communication behaviors have enormous impacts on students’ learning processes and thus have attracted extensive scholarly attention (Mazer, 2013). Teacher confirmation is the process through which teachers communicate to students that they are endorsed, recognized, and acknowledged as valuable individuals (Ellis, 2000). In primarily US-based research, teacher confirmation has been linked to a variety of effective pedagogical practices, student motivation, and emotional outcomes (Ellis, 2004). As McCroskey and McCroskey (2006) stated, it is not likely that instructional practices in other instructional cultures are always as effective as they are in the United States. To understand t…