The current study investigates how foreign language enjoyment (FLE), foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) and attitude/motivation (AM) of 360 learners of English, German, French and Spanish in a Kuwaiti university was shaped over the course of one semester by three teacher behaviours: frequency of using the foreign language (FL) in class,…

This paper examines the use of instructional humor in higher education settings and makes connections between the levels of student achievement in academics and the influence of appropriate instructional humor. The work of prominent researchers such as Wanzer, Frymier, and Irwin (2010), and Segrist & Hupp (2015), who postulate that…

Within their classrooms, instructors may engage in a variety of behaviors including those perceived to be charismatic. Though researchers have uncovered instructor behaviors that have been postulated to theoretically represent charisma in the classroom, to date no quantitative data have been presented to support these claims. The current study…

College students ("n" = 846) enrolled in a general education course were randomly assigned to either an arousal (experimental) or no-arousal (control) group. The experimental group was exposed to a topic-relevant, 90-second external stimulus (a technique used to elevate arousal and focus attention). The control group listened to the…

Using rhetorical/relational goal theory as a guiding frame, we examined relationships between instructor misbehaviors (i.e., indolence, incompetence, and offensiveness) and the likelihood of students communicating antisocial behavioral alteration techniques (BATs). More specifically, the study focused on whether students' perceptions of instructor…

This study replicated and extended a preliminary typology of appropriate and inappropriate teacher humor and advanced three explanations for differences in interpretations of teacher humor. Students were more likely to view teacher humor as inappropriate when it was perceived as offensive and when it demeaned students as a group or individually.…