A Study on the State of Teacher-Student Verbal Interactions during Teaching Process and Its Relationship with Academic Achievement of Middle School Students in Ardabil

ABSTRACT: This study aims to investigate the state of verbal interactions between teachers and students during teaching at middle schools and its correlation with educational progress in students. It uses descriptive statistics, significance of correlation and multiple regression tests through descriptive and correlation methods. To this aim, from 900 middle school teachers in educational districts 1 and 2 in Ardebil city, 300 were selected using Cochran formula and multi-stage cluster method. The students studying in the classes of the selected teachers were selected as the next sample. The data collection instruments included the documents for recording students’ achievement scores, factor analysis rank table, as well as French and Galway non-verbal communication scoring system. The average score obtained by each class at the end of 2001-2002 academic year was regarded as the achievement index (Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories System-FIACS) for that class and the number of recorded codes for each of the ten Flanders’ categories was considered the forecasting variable. The results obtained from this study indicated that the non-verbal communication factors play important roles in educational achievement through teachers’ non-verbal interactions with students and the share of accept-ignore index is higher than the others (B=0.052). In other words, the teachers who pay attention to students when they speak and are not self-centred play significant roles in students’ educational achievement.