Students’ Perceptions of the Ideal-Teacher-As-Reader

United Arab Emirates, ID LLCE2016-326;       Teachers of writing are inevitably students’ primary readers. Every time students write an assignment for class, they have to direct their writing to the teacher who is responsible for evaluating, grading, and giving feedback. Students often know that if they want to be successful, then, they have to meet their teacher-as-readers’ expectations and demands. The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to examine student’s perceptions of the prototypical teacher-as-reader. The participating students-writers were surveyed on their opinions towards various aspects of the responding process such as the purposes for reading students’ papers, background knowledge, feedback practices, grading criteria, and certain argumentative features. Descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyze the data collected via the Student Questionnaire. Comparison of means and One-way ANOVA tests demonstrated that regardless of their proficiency levels, students did not vary in their perceptions of the ideal teacher-as-reader. Overall findings suggested that the students preferred the teacher’s conventional roles of editor, audience, feedback provider, and evaluator over the more facilitative roles. The study concluded with recommendations for future research.

Key words: Reader’ expectations – Students’ perceptions – Writing teacher