Authoritarian and dialogical teachers? expectations and beliefs about their own and students? roles

This study is a product of and supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK, Project No: 108K330). The purpose of this study was to investigate dialogical and authoritarian teachers? expectations and beliefs about their own and students? roles. Furthermore, it is also aimed to explore the differences between the class environments in which authoritarian and dialogical discourses took place. As a total of 15 teachers participated in the study and these teachers participated in a six-month course of in-service training. Mostly dialogical and mostly authoritarian practices of the two teachers? are recorded with a video recorder. These records were later transcribed and inductively analyzed (Patton, 2002). The results indicated that the authoritarian teacher viewed his own role as the source of information and viewed students as the one trying to predict the right answer and confirming teacher?s ideas. In contrast, dialogic teacher viewed teacher as the one caring different ideas, listening to the students, non-judgmental and encouraging them to produce new ideas and he viewed the students as the one generating novel ideas, caring about, listening to and discussing the ideas of others.Keywords: Authoritarian Discourse, Dialogic Discourse, Teacher Expectations and Beliefs.