Communication Currents

It is common for teachers to make requests of their students for a variety of reasons, such as gaining compliance to academic policies and giving assignments. Requests, by definition, are speech acts intended to get people to perform a desired action they otherwise would not have performed. Thus, requests are inherently imposing and face-threatening because they threaten people’s negative face and impinge on their freedom of actions, which may in turn prompt them to try to save face and re-establish the threatened freedom by rejecting such requests.

Although students may respond to teachers’ compliance-gaining requests by resisting, generally teachers expect that their requests result in student compliance because of their role-related authority and because resistance tends to be seen as counter-productive or disruptive in classroom settings. Despite teachers’ best efforts to generate compliance, sometimes their requests incur resistance from students. Thus, it is important to examine how to enhance compliance and reduce resistance in teacher requests.

Many factors (e.g., linguistic, contextual, and relational) may influence students’ responses to teacher requests, such as what the request is, how the request is made, and whether the teacher is perceived by their students as credible. With these questions in mind, we examined how request politeness and legitimacy, teacher-student relationship distance, and teacher credibility affect students’ resistance intention.

Politeness is generally seen to be universal across professions and contexts. Teachers’ professional and social status typically positions them in a role in which they evaluate students’ behaviors, constrain their freedom of actions, control key resources, and give critical feedback. Although teaching inevitably involves some potentially imposing, face-threatening, and freedom-impinging acts, students’ needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy should still be respected in instructional interactions. Face-threat mitigation helps to sustain involvement and motivations, create an optimal learning environment, and enhance performances. In our study, a direct imperative (i.e., “You must quit some of your extracurricular activities”) was used as a low-politeness request, and an indirect question (i.e., “Do you think you could please quit some of your extracurricular activities?”) was adopted as a high-politeness request. Our findings indicated that the more polite a teacher’s request is, the less resistance is typically provoked by students.

Teachers’ authority in the classroom has boundaries, so their requests can be perceived as legitimate or illegitimate, which is largely norm-based. A legitimate request is one that is perceived as the same as or better than students’ expectations, whereas an illegitimate request is one that is perceived as worse than students’ expectations. In our study we used teacher requests “Show me a doctor’s note” and “Send me an email for my records indicating you were sick” as legitimate requests and “Have your doctor call me during my office hours to confirm your illness” as an illegitimate request. We found that students’ perceptions of teacher request legitimacy help reduce student resistance intention. Our findings suggest that legitimate teacher requests appear to trigger less resistance intention than illegitimate requests. When teacher requests are perceived by students to be inappropriate or illegitimate, higher levels of resistance tends to occur.

Relationship distance is also an important factor affecting politeness strategies in teachers’ requests of students. People tend to be more direct and less polite in close relationships than they are in distant relationships. We found that students who describe their relationship with a professor as close are less inclined to perceive the professor’s compliance-gaining requests as a threat to their freedom, and less likely to experience resistance than students who describe their relationship with a professor as distant.   In sum, increases in the closeness in teacher-student relationships appear to lower student resistance in teachers’ compliance-gaining requests. 

Perceived teacher credibility is one of the most important factors influencing instructional processes. According to previous research, teacher credibility entails three key elements: competence, trustworthiness, and caring. Perceived teacher credibility can enhance student learning and motivation.  Our results indicated that students are less likely to resist compliance-gaining requests made by teachers who they consider credible than those teachers they consider less so. However, in comparison with the strong effects of request legitimacy on resistance intention, the effects of perceived teacher credibility seem to be more moderate. Perceived request legitimacy appears to have stronger effects on student resistance intention than perceived teacher credibility.

Given that making requests of students in the classroom is unavoidable, our findings offer interesting implications for teachers in that they can inform and guide teachers on how to lower unintended student resistance in their compliance-gaining attempts. In spite of their imposing nature, requests can be made less face-threatening and less freedom-threatening by using appropriate politeness or face-threat mitigation strategies like these described in our study. Moreover, teachers should not be oblivious of their role in triggering resistance and unfairly blame students for their resistance behavior. It is important for teachers to recognize that students’ reactions to their requests depend on their perceptions of a variety of factors, including the politeness and legitimacy of the request, the closeness of the teacher-student relationship, and the teachers’ credibility.

Therefore, to reduce unintended student resistance, teachers should be careful not to inadvertently trigger resistance and be aware of linguistic, relational, contextual, and personal factors that influence students’ responses to requests in the classroom. Teachers can ask themselves four questions before making a request to a student: How polite is the request? How legitimate is the request? How close is my relationship with the student? And how credible does the student perceive me to be?

Direct, forceful, and illegitimate requests may trigger unintended resistance particularly from students who perceive their teachers as lacking credibility and characterize their relationships with teachers as distant. Therefore, teachers, in spite of their role-related power, should utilize politeness strategies to mitigate face-threats when making compliance-gaining requests, build closer relationships with their students, and enhance their own perceived credibility. Such effects can deflect resistance and lead to desirable outcomes when teachers request their students modify their behaviors in the classroom.