The Role of Chinese EMI Teachers’ Clarity and Credibility in Fostering Students’ Academic Engagement and Willingness to Attend Classes

Abstract

Given the fact that students’ absence and disengagement are among the major challenges that teachers experience in educational contexts, investigating factors contributing to students’ academic engagement and willingness to attend classes is of high importance. These challenges are more common in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) classes wherein students are usually not skilled enough to participate in academic tasks and activities. Accordingly, the present study probed into the role of Chinese EMI teachers’ clarity and credibility in fostering students’ academic engagement and willingness to attend classes. In doing so, the E-version of Teacher Clarity Short Inventory, Source Credibility Scale, Utrecht Work Engagement Scale for Students, and Willingness to Attend Classes Questionnaire was virtually distributed among 832 Chinese college students. Performing correlational analyses, strong associations were found between teachers’ clarity and credibility and students’ academic engagement and willingness to attend classes. To assess the power of Chinese EMI teachers’ clarity and credibility in predicting students’ academic engagement and willingness to attend classes, structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed. The results of SEM analysis illuminated that both teacher clarity and credibility are strong predictors of students’ academic engagement and willingness to attend classes. The implications of the findings are also discussed.

Towards the implications of positive teacher interpersonal behaviors for Spanish learners’ academic engagement: Voices from Chinese SFL learners

“…Besides, some language studies [ 18 , [87] , [88] , [89] , [90] , [91] , [92] ] have also been conducted on positive teacher communication behaviors to measure the impact that they may have on language learners' academic engagement. Derakhshan [ 87 ], for instance, inspected the function of instructor credibility and immediacy in Turkman students' engagement.…”

“…The analysis of the aforementioned questionnaires uncovered the capacity of teacher credibility and immediacy in improving student’ classroom involvement. Likewise, Zheng [ 89 ] explored the function of teacher credibility and clarity in improving Chinese students' engagement. To do this, the e-version of three valid scales was prepared and then administered to participants.…”

University Teacher Credibility as a Strategy to Motivate Students

“…One teacher's behaviour that affects students' state motivation is their perception of teacher credibility (Teven & Hanson, 2004), defined as the student's perception of whether the teacher is believable (McCroskey, 1992). It is an essential variable in the student's perception of the teacher and has a transcendental influence on the teaching-learning process (McCroskey, Valencic, & Richmond, 2004), affecting different variables such as student engagement (De-Besa, Froment, & Gil-Flores, 2023), willingness to attend classes (Zheng, 2021b) and to communicate in class (Lee, 2020) and perceptions of classroom justice (Sun, 2022). Teacher credibility comprises three dimensions: competence, goodwill, and trust (McCroskey & Teven, 1999) .…”

Toward the Role of L2 Enjoyment in EFL Students' Academic Motivation and Engagement

“…and interpersonal traits (e.g., praise, caring, stroke, credibility, immediacy, confirmation, etc.) on students' level of motivation (Furlich, 2016 ; Wijaya, 2017 ; Sabet et al, 2018 ; Khalilzadeh and Khodi, 2021 ; Liu, 2021 ; Peng, 2021 ; Xie and Derakhshan, 2021 , to cite a few) and engagement (Imlawi et al, 2015 ; Papa, 2015 ; Derakhshan, 2021 ; Gao, 2021 ; Lu and Mustafa, 2021 ; Wang and Ye, 2021 ; Zheng, 2021 ; Zhou, 2021 , to cite a few). Many studies have also delved into the impact of students' personal (e.g., self-efficacy, character, etc.)…”