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

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.