Relationships among perceived instructor verbal approach and avoidance relational strategies and students' motives for communicating with their instructors

Abstract

In light of a new “student engagement” benchmark for teaching and institutional effectiveness in higher education, this study focused on the relationships between perceived instructor use of verbal approach and avoidance relational strategies and students' motives for communicating with their instructors. The data suggest that perceived instructor use of verbal approach relational strategies positively influences students' motivation to engage with their instructors for relational, participatory, excuse-making, and sycophantic reasons. Perceived instructor use of verbal avoidance relational strategies, however, was uncorrelated with students' motives to communicate. The results also failed to confirm previous findings that the functional motive to communicate is more related to task purposes than to relational purposes. Findings of this study do imply that student engagement can be enhanced by instructors more emphatically expressing messages of inclusion, appreciation, willingness to communicate, and the like.