Language and Interpersonal Values Education: Teachers' Roles and Perspectives on Students' Language Behaviour Education in Technology-Mediated Communication

摘要

Language which is intertwined with communication is the central aspect of an interpersonal relationship. It contains the dimensions of values, culture and feeling/emotion which can foster or obstruct and damage a social relationship. Thus, it is vital to insert language/communication attitude education within all contexts of teaching and learning, within everyday natural, authentic environment. Today, many teacher-students interactions are mediated by technology. The technology accelerates, eases or buffers communication between students and teachers. Students do not have to come to see their teachers directly to ask for clarification of an assignment, important deadline or missing information. However, relationship/interaction problem can arise when teachers feel that their students do not communicate politely to them. This study aims to explore how two teachers view and feel about their students' language and communication by using technology as the media, how they perceive the significant need of language/communication attitude education and how they perceive their roles to educate students' language/communication behavior. This study adopted qualitative-case study-phenomenology-interview, and written responses approaches to collect and analyze the data. The data show that the teachers feel that in spite of their students' inappropriate/impolite language, they feel that they should become a role model who can show exemplary behavior in communication and facilitate their students to internalize social interpersonal values and reflect/insert those values in their communication. The teachers feel that technology can conceal students' real language/communication capacity. The data also show that language and communication should be taught, learned and practiced naturally (unconsciously) through daily interaction within an authentic environment. The students should not only be taught to be proficient communicators in expressing their ideas on paper assignments, but more importantly, they should be able to use their language/communication to develop and maintain a social relationship with others. This requires both teachers and students to consider the dimensions of ethics, values, culture and emotion in communication.