(1992) used an interesting technique to see how students’ expectations of
foreign instructors played into their attitudes and learning experience.
In that study of how expectations built around accent and race affected
student perceptions and performance, 62 undergraduate native speakers of
English participated. Each undergraduate listened to a 4-minute lecture on
an introductory topic, pre-recorded on tape. There were two possible
lectures, one on a science topic and the other on a humanities topic. While
listening, the student saw a projected slide photograph which was meant to
represent the instructor speaking. Both of the recordings heard were made
by the same speaker (a native speaker of English from central Ohio), but
there were two possible projected photographs: half of the students saw a
slide of a Caucasian woman lecturer, and the other half saw a woman
similarly dressed and of the same size and hair style, but who was Asian.
Both were photographed in the same setting and in the same pose, and in
fact no difference was registered between the Caucasian and the Asian
photographs in terms of physical attractiveness.
Immediately after listening to the 4-minute lecture, each student
completed a test of listening comprehension, and then a testing procedure
which was designed to test homophily, which in effect asks the
respondents to compare the person speaking to themselves and to judge
the degree of similarity or difference. This measurement has been found to
be very useful in studying communicative breakdown across cultural
boundaries. Studies indicate that students “respond more positively to
teachers of optimal homophily” (ibid.: 513). There were other items
included in this questionnaire which asked the students to rate accent
(speaks with an American accent, speaks with an Asian accent), ethnicity,
and quality of teaching.
Figure 6.2 and 6.3 indicate that students clearly perceived the difference
in ethnicity in the slides they looked at. As hypothesized, the Asian
instructor was perceived to be more “Oriental/Asian” than was the
Caucasian instructor, regardless of the subject of the lecture.