The role of speech rate in motivational communication in teacher-student interaction in physical education

Abstract

As a way of combating the rising trend of physical inactivity, physical education has adopted inspiring students to lead a physically active life as one of its main goals. According to self-determination theory, achieving this outcome is more likely, if the students adopt autonomous motivation towards physical education. It is not surprising then that the nature of autonomy-supportive teacher-student interaction in physical education has been studied extensively in the recent years. What is surprising is that this research is almost exclusively focused on the verbal side of communication, seemingly forgetting the nonverbal side of human communication. However, there are some recent efforts focusing on the nonverbal aspects of autonomy-supportive communication in general that aim to address this gap by focusing on what is called motivational prosody. Prosody in general refers to properties and variations of voice that can be used to convey and infer meaning. It has been mainly studied in the fields of communication and speech research, but social and emotional prosody also count among the fields interested in the way we use our voice while communicating. Recent research in motivational prosody builds on these existing approaches while aiming to identify those prosodic properties of voice that are relevant or meaningful especially in motivational communication.

This study examines how speech rate is being used in motivational communication in teacher-student interaction in physical education. The question of interest here is whether the speech rate differs between autonomy-supportive and controlling messages spoken by teachers in physical education. To answer this, 12 autonomy-supportive and 13 controlling messages obtained from recordings of 10 physical education lessons were analyzed here. The selection of messages was done by presenting 42 pre-selected sample messages to 3 independent observers and retaining those messages that all the raters agreed on as being either autonomy-supportive or controlling. Two measures of speech rate were calculated for each message: overall speech rate (syllable count / duration) and articulation rate [syllable count / (duration – disfluencies)]. The two message-types were then compared for differences on these two measures by using independent samples t-tests.

The two message-types differed in terms of their speech rate. The measured articulation rate of autonomy-supportive messages was higher than that of controlling messages (p < 0.05). There was no significant difference in overall speech rate. However, the disfluency counts in the messages turned out to be considerable. As the measure of overall speech rate is sensitive to disfluencies, it might not be a valid measure of speech rate for material derived from real-life contexts. The measured difference in articulation rates indicated that the differences between autonomy-supportive and controlling communication are not limited to the choice of words. Autonomy-supportive messages appear to be spoken more quickly than controlling or, conversely, controlling messages more slowly than autonomy-supportive. The results of this study then further support the argument that studying the nonverbal aspects of motivational communication is an interesting and meaningful avenue of research.