A sociolinguistic approach to the study of teacher expectations∗

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Abstract
The purpose of this study is to provide an application of sociolinguistic analysis to the study of the relationship between teachers’ expectations about students’ communicative competence and the skills involved in teachers’ elicitation of information. The following questions were addressed: Do teachers provide high expectancy students (compared with low expectancy students) with more opportunities to participate in elicitation interactions? How do teachers take more appropriate actions to elicit responses with high expectancy students and provide these students with more explicit positive evaluation of their responses compared with low expectancy students? The subjects were 31 kindergarten students in two classes and their two female teachers. The results indicate that individual teachers can differ in the extent to which they show this effect; however, teachers did not differentiate their behavior consistently across situations.

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