The Relationship Between College English Teachers' Goal Setting And Their Classroom Behaviors

In recent years, the study of motivation theory has been a mainstream in SLA researches. Taxonomy of motivation (Dornyei, 1994) stressed the importance of the learning situation level, in which teacher-specific component is an essential component. In China, English teachers play an important role in English learning process, so it is worthwhile to examine English teachers' performance in the classroom teaching, however, we also learn that nowadays, English teachers, especially college English teachers are faced with several dilemmas. And some of them do not have proper goal for teaching. In the present thesis, therefore, we attempt to employ the goal setting theory to find out whether different goals set by college English teachers are correlated with their classroom behaviors, and what specific behaviors will be affected by teachers' goal setting. The necessity of this research consists in the fact that since teacher-specific motivational component is an essential part of learners' motivations, then the teachers' classroom behaviors will play an important role in English learning process; and that if different goals of teachers do affect their classroom behaviors, then we can learn from the present study to help college English teachers set appropriate goals to improve their classroom behaviors so as to produce better effect on Second Language Acquisition.56 college English teachers in the same university participate in the study. The study uses two effective questionnaires—goal setting questionnaires and QTI(Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction). Finally we got 50 valid answers to thequestionnaires, learning distinct goals set by different English teachers and their various classroom behaviors; and we collected data from the questionnaires for processing and analyzing. The results indicate that distinct goals of college English teachers exert prominent influences on many aspects of their classroom behaviors. Those who got higher scores in goal setting questionnaire often appeared to be more active in the class, such as being more capable of organizing an effective learning environment, more humorous and helping and understanding; and they were less likely to be dissatisfied with their students or be at a loss as to what to do in the class, vice versa; besides we learned that clear and specific goals do result in better behaviors, and goal conflicts may not happen because teachers always know which goal is the most important and should be accomplished first.The study also shows important factors that have impacts on college English teachers' goal setting such as different educational backgrounds and school resources and rewarding systems. And we should correct all negative factors in order to ensure that every teacher has a correct and specific and clear goal for teaching so as to improve their classroom behaviors.