Implementing Flanders System in the Quantification of the Emotional Aspects of Teacher-Student Discourse

Flanders’ system of interaction analysis (1970) is one of the most important models that have been widely used for the examination of the nature of the pedagogical discourse taking place between instructors and learners. This is due to the nature of such a quantitative analytical system that enables the researcher to measure the socio-emotional dimension embedded in teachers’ discourse, with the potential of targeting different educational levels. Therefore, this paper aims to shed light on the usability of the model in conducting quantitative studies on pathos, aside from the rest of the qualitative discourse studies prevalent in the literature. Also, the analysis of pathos-related patterns in the context of educational discourse did not receive the same attention as other discourse types, despite the presence of many emotional appeals in the speech patterns of teachers, which are used in endorsing the learners’ feelings and considering the social dimension of education. Since this paper is mainly concerned with teacher-student discourse, it must be noted that paying attention to the psychology of adults is not less important than that which should be present with younger learners, as the psychology of the student is no less complex than the psychology of the pupil. Flanders labels the socio-emotional verbal behaviour by the term "indirect influence", which is a key factor in drawing the learner's attention toward the content of education, as many studies have proven the existence of a positive correlation between this type of discourse and the potential of learning. On the other hand, the adoption of an authoritative discourse style in the classroom has counterproductive effects, and this pattern was referred to in Flanders Model as "direct influence". Taking into account the aforementioned data, we will try in this paper to explain how to gauge the socio-emotional tendency in teachers’ discourse via statistical data, while presenting our findings in this regard through the application of Flanders interaction analysis system (FIACS).