A Study Of Student Expectations About The Roles Of Teachers And Students From The Cross-cultural Perspective

Understanding learner expectations about language learning is essential to understand learner strategies and plan appropriate instruction. Many language educators and researchers maintain that matching the expectations of teachers and students is important for successful language learning (Schulz, 2001). The mismatch between teachers and students might lead to many serious consequences, which will disturb the process of both teaching and learning. Researchers have been exploring this theme for a long time. However, there are only few studies on how these expectations may differ among different cultural groups. It indicates that studying the influence of culture on expectations is dramatically necessary and of practical significance. This thesis aims at exploring the influence of cultural differences on student expectations about the roles of both teachers and students.To achieve the research purpose, three research questions have been designed: (1) Do students of different cultural backgrounds have different expectations about the roles of their own? If so, to what extent? (2) Do students of different cultural backgrounds have different expectations about the roles of teachers? If so, to what extent? (3) Which cultural dimension exerts influence on both teacher and student expectations? A 5-point Likert-scales questionnaire and an interview are used in the research to deal with the above research questions.With the cross-cultural theoretical framework, an investigation is done between two groups of participants. One group is Chinese students, and the other comes from America. All the data are carefully evaluated and analysed in detail with both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Based on the comprehensive analysis, some differences are found out in student expectations about teacher and student roles between different cultural groups. Taking this into consideration, the author tries to find the specific causes, and then proposes some suggestions for both teaching and learning.