Abstract:

Over the last thirty years, theoretical concepts of leadership have been discussed in terms of instructor’s leadership in classroom settings. Silins (1994a) stated that increased accountability of principals and instructors has placed new demands on these professionals to provide leadership in their prospective learning environments. Helm (1993) suggested that transformational leadership is the style compatible with the goals of educational leadership. Nurturing the dual purpose of providing an effective education with a quality academic education is the particular responsibility and charge of the school leader (Helm, 2003). These findings were consistent with Taguiri (1968) who suggested that instructors engaged in Transformational leadership constructs such as, the communication of high expectations, usage of symbolic words and modeling behaviors had higher performing students. While these studies of classroom leadership exist, an explicit discussion on the challenges of distance learning and communicative behavior or language associated with classroom instructor and transformational leadership has not been investigated. The purpose of this study is to investigate specific language associated with leadership style as discussed by Salter, Green, Carmody-Bubb, and Duncan (2007) utilizing two leader’s scenarios: leader one- utilizing words associated with leaders scoring above the mean as transformational leaders and leader two- using words associated with leaders scoring below the mean as transformational leaders. The operational definition of the leadership rating was measured by respondents by the Bass & Avolio’s (1994) MLQ-5X.

Keywords:

Transformational Leadership, Distance Learning, language and leadership.