Is it in their words? Teachers' enthusiasm and their natural language in class–A sentiment analysis approach

Frenzel, Anne C. ; Kleen, Hannah; Marx, Anton K. G. ; Sachs, David F.; Baier‐Mosch, Franziska und Kunter, Mareike (1. Januar 2025): Is it in their words? Teachers' enthusiasm and their natural language in class–A sentiment analysis approach. In: British Journal of Educational Psychology [Forthcoming]

Abstract

Introduction: Teacher enthusiasm is an undisputedly important characteristic of teachers, with demonstrated positive effects on student outcomes. Existing research typically operationalised teacher enthusiasm via trait-based teacher- or student ratings. Strikingly little is known about how teachers' trait enthusiasm manifests in their actual in-situ classroom behaviour. Some findings have been reported regarding teachers' nonverbal behaviours, but the links between teacher enthusiasm and teacher language are unknown so far.

Methods: The present contribution fills this research gap by applying lexicon-based sentiment analysis to quantify teachers' emotional tone from transcribed teacher utterances obtained from video recordings of full mathematics lessons (45 min). N = 19 secondary school mathematics teachers and their N = 393 students participated in our study. We realised the sentiment analysis using Remus et al.'s emotion lexicon SentiWS (v2.0, 2019). We obtained both teacher self-reports and student ratings to assess teachers' enthusiasm, shown habitually (trait), and during the videotaped lesson (in situ).

Results: Regarding trait enthusiasm, teachers' own, but not the students', ratings were positively linked with teachers' verbally expressed sentiment in the videotaped lesson, specifically its positive valence. Regarding in-situ enthusiasm, associations were even larger but also did not reach significance for the student ratings.

Conclusion: This is the first study to employ sentiment analysis on transcripts of German teachers' in-class talk. Besides the quantitative links between teacher enthusiasm and their language, it also provides qualitative insights on positive emotional teacher talk in mathematics.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Psychologie und Pädagogik > Department Psychologie > Klinische Psychologie des Kindes- und Jugendalter und Beratungspsychologie
• Themengebiete: 100 Philosophie und Psychologie > 150 Psychologie
• ISSN: 0007-0998
• Bemerkung: Online Version of Record before inclusion in an issue
• Sprache: Englisch
• DFG: Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - 282833022