STRATEGIES PERFORMED BY TEACHERS AS A FORM OF PERSUASION AND INFLUENCE DURING CLASSES: DEMOCRACY OR AUTHORITY?

The communicative strategies used by teachers during the lessons have a significant impact not only on the educational interaction, but also on its results. Despite the abundance of studies that analyze communication strategies and their potential in building effective communication, teachers’ communication strategies and their impact on the educational results of students have not been properly covered.

The article provided a survey of communication that serve to realize the teachers’ intentions aimed at explaining, assessing, controlling, encouraging, and organizing namely the strategies performed by lectures at the university.

The study involved 27 teachers working at the Moscow State University of Food Production and Surgut State Pedagogical University. During the conducted classes of academic year 2017/18, a video was recorded for the purpose of subsequently analyzing the communication strategies they implemented and their impact on the educational outcomes of the classroom. Prior to the research, the study groups (321 students), which the teachers worked into, were voluntarily surveyed; the purpose was to identify students’ preferred communication strategies for interaction with teachers in the classroom. At the end of the research, the survey was repeated to identify the presence / absence of transformation in the views of the subjects on the issues under study.

The research method was the discourse analysis and the statistics data analysis and its interpretation; the cognitive study, discourse texts’ linguistic analysis proper to identify the communicative strategies and speech tactics and moves. To generalize, classify and interpret the results observed the descriptive method was used. In addition, there were used elements of contextual and quantitative methods of analysis and also scientific methods of observation, generalization and comparison. As a result, the most common and effective communicative strategies and language means of communicative intention to explain, assess, control, encourage, and organize were singled out and their choice explained.

The results showed an ambiguous correlation between the communicative strategies used by teachers and the effectiveness of educational interaction in the classroom, as well as the communicative orientations of the students: often students, rationally choosing a democratic style of interaction with teachers and claiming that it contributes to better educational outcomes, tended toward a more authoritarian type of communication in practice.

The results showed that in the course of the discourse in question, the speakers used those linguistic means that helped to save their image, thus having implemented the effect achieved. Moreover, the study showed the importance of further investigation in order to explain how communicative intentions will be received by its targets and thus how it may succeed (or fail) as a form of persuasion and influence during classes.