Teachers’ communicative style: The role of perceived autonomy, competence, and relatedness

Abstract

Teachers’ communicative style has been recently addressed by researchers, yet the reason why teachers use a certain style remains unexplored. This study aimed to identify profiles of teachers’ communicative style and how these relate to teachers’ needs (autonomy, relatedness and competence) and students’ performance. The sample comprised a total of 48 teachers and 1150 students. At the student-level, latent profile analysis showed three profiles: gain-framed messages (GFM), no-messages (NM), and all-messages (AM). At the teacher-level, multilevel profile analysis showed an active and a passive profile. Results indicated that both, the thwarting and the fulfilment, of teachers’ basic needs was related to the communicative style they adopted. Likewise, the communicative style adopted by teachers was related to student’s performance. Thus, present findings help to better understand why teachers adopt certain behaviours and how these relate to student outcomes.