THE EFFECT OF SHARING A TEACHER’S NATIVE LANGUAGE ON TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF STUDENTS’ BEHAVIOUR AND STUDENT’S LEVEL OF INTEREST IN SCHOOL.

Abstract

This paper explores the effect of linguistically congruent teachers on teachers’ perception of students and students’ interest towards school. The paper also studies the effect of linguistic match as a complement to racial matching, which provides a fuller picture of a shared cultural identity. Using a dataset from the United States which sampled 8th graders, a student fixed effects strategy was employed, essentially comparing, two different teachers’ evaluation and a student’s interest in school, across two different academic subjects, within-student. The results show that having linguistically congruent teachers potentially lead to increased student interest towards Mathematics and Social Studies. Furthermore, having a co-racial teacher who is also linguistically congruent potentially improves student’s interest towards Science, Mathematics and Social Studies; teacher’s perception was also improved in the English subject. These findings suggest that teacher’s perception and student’s interest may improve if students and teachers are matched based on native language.