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RESEARCH PRODUCT

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

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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 the classroom dynamics in a global setting, instructional communication researchers increasingly have examined the extent to which teaching practices enacted in the United States can be applied to other countries. Goldman, Bolkan, and Goodboy (2014) observed that teacher confirmation has a greater effect on students learning in the United States than in China or Turkey. Goodboy, Bolkan, Beebe, and Schultz (2010), investigating the cross-cultural behavioral alteration techniques and affinity-seeking strategies with instructors, reported that while Chinese students use more behavioral alteration techniques, American students use more diverse varieties of affinity-seeking. These classroom differences were mainly attributed to the national cultural differences such as individualism vs. collectivism and power distance.