Regina Jucks and Benjamin Brummernhenrich

22Out-of-Classroom Interactions Between Teachers and Students: Advising, Tutoring, Mentoring, and Coaching

Abstract: This chapter provides insights concerning different psychological and communicational challenges that come into play when teachers communicate with individual students in one-on-one interaction. At every level of education and training – from early school years through adulthood – much meaningful instruction takes place in the context of advising, tutoring, mentoring, and coaching, but these contexts involve communication-related challenges that impact the effectiveness and appropriateness of instruction. In this chapter, we review the findings of several strands of research, including direct instruction, peer tutoring, and expertlayperson communication as they provide helpful frameworks for identifying the challenges of out-of-classroom interactions between teachers and students. We also provide realistic scenarios to illustrate the principles of communication in one-on-one instruction, and we invoke the theories of politeness and facework to help explain some of the interpersonal dynamics of individualized instruction.

Keywords: advising, tutoring, mentoring, coaching, out-of-class communication, expert-layperson communication, one-on-one-instruction, facework, politeness theory, technical language

Teacher-student interactions are not restricted to classroom encounters. A good deal of instructional communication – some of it very important – occurs outside the classroom context. In after-class conversations to clarify course material, planned meetings to discuss academic progress, and one-on-one training/ learning sessions, instructional messages frequently take the form of advising, tutoring, mentoring, and coaching. In this chapter, we provide conceptual and operational definitions for each of these four contexts and focus on some communication-related challenges instructors typically face in these out-of-classroom situations. Through the use of realistic vignettes, we illustrate these communication challenges and offer explanations and solutions from the findings of communication and learning research. We conclude the chapter with a synthesis of one-on-one instruction and offer directions for scholars to pursue this research area in the future.

Advising

Providing academic advice to undergraduate students is often seen as the responsibility or the burden of faculty members (Swanson, 2006). They guide undergraduates through their college years and serve as knowledgeable communication partners in many areas relevant to student life (Tuttle, 2000). Compared to tutoring, advising may also include the personal concerns of the protégé (Taylor, Jowi, Schreier, & Bertelsen, 2011). Taylor and her colleagues asserted that students typically bring three interpersonal goals into advising sessions: instrumental, relational, and self-presentational. Instrumental goals are task-oriented and typically involve the student’s selection of a major, specific courses leading to the major, and any academic or course-related problems that occur during the semester. Relational goals address how physical or psychological distance between the adviser and student might be reduced (e.g., how to get the adviser to use the student’s first name). Self-presentational goals may address how one self-presents to the adviser (e.g., regarding self-disclosure or facework). In some instances, faculty advisers may take into account all three interpersonal goals of their student advisee. It is more common that they limit their activities to primarily instructional matters and hence focus on the instrumental goals. Conceptualizing advising as expert-layperson communication (Jucks, Brummernhenrich, Becker, & Bromme, 2014) helps to cast light on the challenges this communication context imposes on professors, especially when they offer academic advising. As instructors, they speak out of their academic expertise to provide insight for their advisees. Providing advice can be seen as a central function of experts who have to not only translate the specialized knowledge but also transform it by tailoring it to fit a concrete problem and, above all, by selecting and weighting information from the range of competing offers (Bromme & Jucks, in prep.). Hence, expert-layperson communication is not only about the transfer of existing knowledge, but also about solving practical problems and preparing advisees to make decisions for themselves in the future, though currently they are unable to make competent decisions rationally on the basis of their own knowledge without drawing on the expert’s own selections and judgments.

Finding the Right Words in Order to be Understood: Use of Technical Language

Professor Luca is an old hand. He has been advising undergraduates for more than 20 years. Though times have changed and interactions with undergraduates take more time than earlier, the job has stayed mainly the same. Although Professor Luca, an IT expert, has a lot of practice in advising students, he sometimes struggles with providing explanations. Today Jeffery, a first-year geography student, has asked him about how to enroll in a distance learning course. It took quite a while until Professor Luca realized that Jeffery did not understand expressions such as “Please enroll in a MOOC.” When trying to explain this more comprehensibly, he was astonished to find out that it was not the technical term “MOOC” that was causing Jeffery problems. Jeffery did not understand the precise meaning of “enroll” in the context of distance learning – though the word is indubitably a basic term at a university.

Obviously, technical language can provide a barrier to a layperson’s or novice’s understanding, and unfamiliar terms like MOOC can not only reveal a student’s lack of knowledge but also cause feelings of insecurity or a lack of self-confidence. The use of technical terms such as MOOC is closely related to an expert’s own perspective: Experts use technical terms automatically because their own thoughts and disciplinary communication allow easy access and precise references (Jucks & Paus, 2012). Words like MOOC are easy to identify as technical terms, so both sides – experts and laypersons – are aware of the necessity to explain them. However, in this case, it was not only the term MOOC that caused Jeffery’s confusion. Here is an instance where an everyday word such as enroll can become equally problematic. In this conversation with his adviser, Jeffery did not understand the difference between enrolling in a course for college credit and enrolling in a MOOC. Such subtleties of language occur in every interpersonal context, including academic advising. Words that appear comprehensible are not easy to detect as incomprehensible or, in interdisciplinary communication, as referring to anything other than their well-known everyday meaning.

Taking the Recipient’s Perspective

Providing advice is not restricted to an adequate, that is, comprehensible use of technical language. It also requires experts to build a precise model of the recipient’s knowledge base and to adapt their explanations accordingly. To achieve this, experts need first to reflect on the relationship between their own mental model and that of the recipient (Jucks & Bromme, 2011). Moreover, they need to consider how further information (e.g., technical words used by communication partners or scientific illustrations) influences their own perspective. They need to become aware of how their cognitive processes are stimulated by the available materials, and whether this is a non-shared external representation or a specific cue within an inquiry (e.g., the technicality of word use). They need to reflect on what they can do to convey the subject matter while simultaneously taking into account their recipient’s needs. Empirical research shows clearly that experts’ cognitive capacities for perspective taking are limited by situational variables such as time pressure (Jucks & Bromme, 2011). The cognitive processes relevant for perspective taking are not triggered automatically during the formulation of expert explanations. Instead, contextual variables such as available information and interlocutor’s word use have been shown to impact experts’ lexical and semantic decisions (Jucks, Becker, & Bromme, 2008). Although this is true for both face-to-face and written computer-mediated communication, it is aggravated in the latter case by the lack of direct feedback from the interlocutor (Jucks & Bromme, 2011). Researchers and practitioners aiming to improve the effectiveness of academic advice offered through computer-mediated interaction therefore need to take these contextual variables into account.

Tutoring

Tutoring is usually defined as a one-on-one interaction with the aim of the tutee mastering a certain task or learning a specific content (Graesser, D’Mello, & Cade, 2011). Tutoring comes in many varieties: In the standard case, tutors are more knowledgeable than the tutee or, ideally, are experts in the subject matter, and they are able to select from a wide range of suitable problems and solutions (Lepper & Woolverton, 2002). However, tutors who are experts in their field are not necessarily also experienced in teaching (Cohen, Kulik, & Kulik, 1982). As a result, the terms expert tutor and novice tutor are ambiguous because they can refer to topical or to pedagogical competence.

Compared with advising, mentoring, and coaching, tutoring is the most content-focused context for out-of-class instructional communication: There is usually a specific topic or task with which the tutee requires help, and the tutor’s job is to support the tutee on the path to mastering the content. Regarding learning outcomes, tutoring is a very effective form of instruction: Learners routinely achieve higher learning gains in a tutoring context than in other forms of instruction such as classroom instruction or the use of learning materials by themselves (Cohen et al., 1982; Graesser et al., 2011). This is true for both expert and novice tutors, even though they unsurprisingly differ in their communication behaviors (Glass et al., 1999). Although expert tutors usually achieve higher learning gains, novice tutors operate at about the same degree of abstractness as their tutees, so their explanations might even be more immediately useful than those by content experts (Hinds, 1999).

A common variant is peer tutoring, which can also be described as a form of cooperative learning and is often prompted and structured by an instructor. Even without an input of knowledge from an expert, this form of tutoring is effective if learners can be encouraged to ask each other deep questions and discuss the learning materials transactively (King, 1998). Transactive communication is characterized by reciprocal references to content, for example when a student asks a question about, gives an explanation of, or elaborates on a concept that another student has introduced into the discourse. Generating certain types of questions, such as those that concern relationships between different concepts, has been shown to foster social construction of knowledge (King, 2002).

Tutoring exists in formal contexts, for example, as a supportive activity in colleges in which advanced or graduate students tutor undergraduates on the topic of a certain course. Tutoring is also often used at writing centers maintained by colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Additionally, there is a large private tutoring market offering help for secondary and tertiary students struggling with certain subjects. Especially in parts of Asia, this market has become so ubiquitous that it has been labeled shadow education and shown to impact education policy – sometimes even adversely (Baker, Akiba, LeTendre, & Wiseman, 2001). Tutoring in this commercial form is confronted with high expectations. Those who pay for private tutoring (mostly parents) want to see positive results (e.g., better grades in schools). However, crucial questions persist for both parents and education researchers: What exactly is tutoring able to achieve? To what degree does the success of a tutorial rest on the tutor’s communicative behavior? Can educational goals be reached equally effectively through computer-mediated forms of tutoring (e.g., Bromme, Brummernhenrich, Becker, & Jucks, 2012) and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) – that is, software that uses simulated pedagogical agents as tutors (Rus, D’Mello, Hu, & Graesser, 2013). Indeed, some of these systems achieve learning gains similar to those achieved with human tutors (VanLehn, 2011). This is a promising area of research: ITS enable adaptive, individualized tutoring without the need for a single tutor for every learner. However, the development of these programs for a new set of content is still very time-consuming and thus expensive – especially for ill-defined problems. Nevertheless, because these systems usually try to emulate expert human tutors, this field of research has generated a lot of valuable insight into what makes expert tutoring so effective.

What Factors Make Tutorial Communication Effective?

When addressing this question, detailed analyses have examined the ways in which experienced tutors structure interactions and the kinds of strategies they employ. The sequence of an expert tutoring session is often as follows (Lepper & Woolverton, 2002): The tutor first selects a problem that is suitable for the topic at hand and presents it to the tutee by describing its features. In the next phase, the tutee becomes more active and solves the problem while being supported by the tutor. After reaching the solution, the tutor encourages the tutee to reflect on the problem and its solution and, if necessary, provides additional information on the topic that had not been covered before.

In contrast to sequencing tutoring exchanges in a structural manner, another approach has been to identify expert tutors’ dialogue modes, meaning clusters of moves that share a common goal (Cade, Copeland, Person, & D’Mello, 2008). The most common modes in Cade et al.’s study were scaffolding (collaborative problemsolving by the tutor and the tutee), lecturing (the tutor provides information to the tutee), and modeling (the tutor demonstrates the solution to a problem). Scaffolding and lecturing apparently often occur in cycles: Episodes in which the tutee tries to solve a task with intermittent input from the tutor are followed by the focused provision of information on the next subtopic, followed, again, by another problem-solving episode.

Although this process is obviously very dynamic, expert tutors do not just react to the tutee’s actions. Instead they have distinct plans for their tutoring sessions and a clear goal structure for the interaction (Glass et al., 1999). They also have many domain-specific problems at their disposal that they can present to their tutees (Lepper & Woolverton, 2002).

Studies at the micro or strategy level have investigated the specific strategies or kinds of speech acts tutors use. Common tutorial strategies include hinting, questions such as open-ended pumps, closed prompts, as well as comprehension-gauging questions, explanations (or direct instruction), and positive and negative feedback (Chi, Siler, Jeong, Yamauchi, & Hausmann, 2001; Cromley & Azevedo, 2005; Lepper & Woolverton, 2002; Merrill, Reiser, Merrill, & Landes, 1995). Feedback can be short, indicating only whether a tutee action or response was correct, or more verbose, detailing what was wrong or elaborating on the correct response. Examples of these strategies are listed in Table 1.

Table 1: Examples of Common Tutorial Strategies

Tutorial strategy	Example
Hint	“Take a look at the plots.”
Prompt	“What else could it be apart from an interval scale?”
Pump	“And what then?”
Comprehension-gauging question	“Did you understand that?”
Explanation	“Eta squared is a measure of effect size.”
Short positive feedback	“Right.”
Elaborate positive feedback	“Exactly, it’s significant because the p value is smaller than .05.”
Short negative feedback	“No.”
Elaborate negative feedback	“No, those aren’t categories.”

When comparing expert and novice tutors, expert tutors seem to be less direct and try to guide the tutee toward finishing the task (Lepper & Woolverton, 2002; Lu, Di Eugenio, Kershaw, Ohlsson, & Corrigan-Halpern, 2007). They seldom provide tutees directly with correct solutions. The aim is not just to motivate the student: “Experienced human tutors maintain a delicate balance, allowing students to do as much of the work as possible and to maintain a feeling of control, while providing students with enough guidance to keep them becoming frustrated or confused” (Merrill, Reiser, Ranney, & Trafton, 1992, p. 280). On the other hand, novice tutors more often provide direct instruction and correct answers and also seem to devote more time to motivating moves directly (Cromley & Azevedo, 2005).

In contrast to these findings, other research suggests that expert tutors give very direct feedback (D’Mello, Lehman, & Person, 2010) and that this prevents the tutee from getting “off track” (Anderson, Corbett, Koedinger, & Pelletier, 1995). Determining which kind of feedback is most effective – direct or delayed, short or elaborate – presumably depends on factors such as the learner’s previous knowledge and confidence (Shute, 2008). Thus, it is not possible to state a general rule about which specific type of feedback is the best in a tutoring session, and expert tutors typically adapt their feedback according to situational variables. However, completely withholding feedback on incorrect responses or actions, or providing positive feedback in response to incorrect tutee actions, as novice tutors sometimes do (Person & Graesser, 2003), is very likely to be detrimental for learning.

Gauging the Recipient’s State of Knowledge

Nicole is a senior student at a large Midwestern university, working hard at her degree in psychology. However, she also works as a tutor in the university’s tutoring program. She regularly tutors freshman and sophomore students in statistics, a course she has passed reasonably well but that she finds many other students are struggling with. Usually, the students come to her because they need help with a certain piece of coursework.

Today, she has an appointment with Christopher, a sophomore. She has already tutored Christopher twice: The first time she explained the reasoning behind using histograms and helped him construct one from a list of values. The second time they worked on a problem with correlations and regression. This time it seems that the course has progressed to two-way analyses of variance, and Christopher is once again stuck with the coursework. Although his grasp of the concepts of sums of squares and the F test is, as Nicole finds by going through the task with him, surprisingly good, he has trouble interpreting disordinal interactions. Nicole draws some other, simpler patterns on the board and asks Christopher to explain their meanings. In this manner, they successively approach the case shown in the coursework, and Christopher finally manages the correct interpretation. Nicole then encourages him to transfer his newly acquired skill to a different problem.

After the session, Nicole is quite exhausted: The topic itself is not new or demanding for her, but for a long time, she could not really tell where exactly Christopher’s understanding had failed. It was hard to get Christopher to consider both variables at the same time. Nicole thinks it might have been easier just to tell him what to do and how to think about the patterns, but then he would have been less active himself, and she is not sure whether the insight would have stuck or whether he might have found her too direct.

Tutoring offers great opportunities for learning. One crucial aspect of any instructional communication is to gauge what parts of the critical content the addressee has understood, what has not been understood, and whether the learner holds any misconceptions about the topic under discussion. Hence, diagnosing Christopher’s current state of knowledge is a major challenge: The result contributes to the effectiveness of Nicole’s tutoring session.

In general, diagnosing what a tutee knows is important for making didactic decisions (Herppich, Wittwer, Nückles, & Renkl, 2014) and for maximizing the effectiveness of explanations (Wittwer & Renkl, 2008). Tutors’ models of their tutees’ knowledge are not always accurate: Novice tutors lack diagnostic skills and are unable to differentiate their own normative view of the subject matter from the tutees’ flawed understanding (Chi, Siler, & Jeong, 2004). However, expert tutors can also be led astray, because many tutees’ utterances are uninformative or misleading regarding their state of knowledge (Person, Graesser, Magliano, & Kreuz, 1994). Thus, eliciting informative contributions from the tutee that will permit a valid diagnosis of the tutee’s knowledge is crucial if the tutor is to provide adaptive tutoring (Putnam, 1987). This might be exactly what expert tutors do when they alternate phases of lecturing with phases of scaffolding (Cade et al., 2008): Longer phases of semi-independent problem solving on the part of the tutee allow the tutor to diagnose at what point the tutee’s own attempts have failed. However, even if the tutee’s knowledge has been diagnosed correctly, the instruction might be insufficient: Even expert tutors sometimes ignore misconceptions altogether (Chi, 1996) or give positive feedback after errors (Graesser, Person, & Magliano, 1995).

Knowing which strategies tutors use does not clarify which ones are effective. It is difficult to single out discrete strategies in naturalistic tutoring interactions in order to study them experimentally. However, detailed analyses of tutoring discourses can provide evidence on the point in the discourse at which tutee learning occurs. Such analyses indicate that expert tutors’ indirect mode of instruction leads to effective learning: In these discourses, tutees usually discover a piece of knowledge or correct a misconception themselves after receiving hints or being led to asking questions by the tutor (Chi, 1996). Letting the tutees encounter impasses in solving a task also seems to be beneficial because it helps them recognize which pieces of knowledge they lack in order to proceed (VanLehn, Siler, Murray, Yamauchi, & Baggett, 2003). Generally, episodes in which knowledge is co-constructed between tutor and tutee seem to be particularly beneficial for deep tutee learning (Chi, 2009; Chi et al., 2001).

Mentoring

Of the four instructional contexts discussed in this chapter, mentoring is arguably the most intensive. Mentoring can be defined as “a nurturing process in which a more skilled or more experienced person, serving as a role model, teaches, sponsors, encourages, counsels, and befriends a less skilled or less experienced person for the purpose of promoting the latter’s professional and/or personal development” (Anderson & Shannon, 1988, p. 40). This implies a long-term commitment of both mentor and protégé as well as the development of a lasting and trusting relationship (Kalbfleisch & Davies, 1993). In contrast to the other contexts, mentoring does not have a specific content or goal at its end, but aims rather to socialize the protégé in the relevant business, institution, or community and support her or his career and development (Schrodt, Cawyer, & Sanders, 2003). Unlike coaches, tutors, and advisers, a mentor is not responsible for an outcome as much as for a person. As such, it is more appropriate to speak of a form of guidance than of instruction.

To this end, mentors are usually senior, experienced, and/or influential members of the relevant context (Anderson & Shannon, 1988). They act as role models but also facilitate career advancement by, for example, providing information, establishing connections, and opening up networks for their protégé (Anderson & Shannon, 1988; Schrodt et al., 2003). This often leads to more satisfaction as well as to higher achievement and faster promotion for the protégé (Dreher & Ash, 1990; Schrodt et al., 2003).

Social Roles and Their Impact on Communication

Anna is a post doc in the Communication Department. She received her PhD three years ago and is on her way to a successful career as a researcher. As in many other universities, her department has started a mentoring program for female researchers. The underlying idea has been communicated to Anna, and she knows that successful female professors serve as role models and help with questions arising on the way to tenure. Therefore, she decides to join the mentoring program. Last week Anna was introduced to Professor Malan, a senior professor from the Department of Chemistry. The administration of the mentoring program provides some information sheets that should help the two of them to get started with the mentoring and to document the process for subsequent generations. Anna is a bit worried about how the meetings with her mentor will proceed. She has heard from older colleagues that they had been very close to their mentors and found the program very helpful and rewarding. Anna, however, does not know Professor Malan and is unsure about what to expect and on what level they will communicate.

Mentoring encompasses two sets of functions or roles for the mentor: professional and psychosocial (Kram, 1983). Professionally, the mentor will try to advance the protégé’s career and will typically give feedback on the protégé’s professional performance. Psychosocially, the mentor can contribute to the protégé’s sense of competence and identity by lending affirmation and emotional support.

However, these roles can be at odds: At the end of the semester, Anna’s teaching performance, as judged by student evaluations at the end of the course, has been sub-standard in comparison to other faculty. Professor Malan has to decide what to do: In his role as a professional mentor, he should give Anna explicit feedback and advice in order to enable Anna to learn and improve. (“Your teaching wasn’t too well-received. As far as I can tell, your lectures seem to lack interactivity.”) As a psychosocial mentor, he should focus more on supporting Anna, who is understandably upset about the dismal results, and keep her spirits up while enabling a productive appraisal.

On a communication level, this also presents problems for Anna. Suppose that Professor Malan says, “Well, it’s hard to be a great teacher.” What does he mean by that? Is he showing sympathy, or does he expect her to try harder? According to relevance theory, ambiguous utterances are interpreted in a manner that maximizes their relevance or usefulness in a certain situation (Demeure, 2010). If Anna sees Professor Malan as a mentor with a professional focus, she will likely understand him as pushing her to work harder on her teaching success. If Anna understands his aim as providing support, she will also interpret this statement as a facesaving response in view of negative student feedback.

Conversational rules have been proposed as a solution for situations in which it can be unclear as to what kind of communication is appropriate (Person, Kreuz, Zwaan, & Graesser, 1995). If Professor Malan states, “I would like to talk about your teaching performance and what you can do about it,” it is clear what Anna should expect from the following conversation.

Ideally, a mentor should be able to fulfill both professional and psychosocial roles. Communicative adaptability, meaning the ability to adapt one’s communication to different contextual and relational demands, can help mentors cope with the sometimes conflicting strategies these roles can suggest (Kalbfleisch & Davies, 1993). Adaptability is a way to cope with the inherent risk of being a mentor: By opening up to the protégé, mentors are making themselves vulnerable. Regarding teaching evaluations, Professor Malan sometimes uses a subtle technique: He brings cookies to the last course session of a semester, nominally to thank the students for their hard work and commitment, but also because he suspects that it might help evaluation scores. He hesitates to share this technique because he fears that Anna might judge him as insincere and not a great teacher himself. In these situations, communicative adaptability is a means to judge what kind of information can or should not be disclosed. By applying appropriate disclosure, that is knowing what to divulge and when, mentors as well as protégés can balance the benefits and risks of the mentoring relationship (Kalbfleisch & Davies, 1993).

How to Structure the Communication?

The concept of conversational rules hints at another aspect of professional mentoring, the importance of structuring the communication. Although mentoring often starts informally, it is beneficial to clarify the contents of the mentoring and the manner in which these will be discussed. Ideally, mentors and protégés should discuss their expectations and define what will and what will not be part of the mentoring relationship (Johnson, 2002). That will clarify for both parties the scope and tone of their mentoring meetings and make it easier to agree upon a clear agenda.

Structuring the relationship also includes setting boundaries and defining what the communication should not include. For instance, mentors should make it clear in what areas they do not feel competent enough to give good advice (Williams-Nickelson, 2009): Professor Malan may be able to give very good guidance concerning Anna’s teaching but may be relatively inexperienced in leading committees. Explicitly structuring mentoring communication can help to avoid disappointment and confusion stemming from the different roles and tasks of mentoring. A friendly and supportive atmosphere in the meetings might than be clearly attributed to the context and might not be seen as an indicator of a mentee’s performance. Hence, frustration on the side of the mentee might be reduced when being confronted with a bad grade or other unpleasant evaluation, as the quality of the social relation is not an indicator of a mentee’s performance level (Kram, 1983).

Coaching

Like the other instructional contexts discussed in this chapter, coaching is also usually a one-on-one interaction. The focus of coaching is usually a certain set of skills or a specific goal that the coach helps the learner to acquire. This can take place in diverse contexts: The three most salient variants are academic coaching (Griffiths, 2005), executive coaching (Stern, 2004), and athletic coaching (Hodges & Franks, 2002). In contrast to tutoring, the goal of coaching typically is not a specific task or content but rather a broader goal or acquired skill set. Thus, the process is usually implemented over a longer time-frame than in tutoring, and the role of the coach is rather to act as a resource and guide for the learner. Consequently, strong relationships can develop between coach and learner, though perhaps less enduring than in mentoring interactions.

The process of coaching usually begins by formulating the goal or skill set that the learner wants to achieve. Coach and learner then discuss situations in which the goal or skill is relevant and what steps the learner could take next (Griffiths, 2005; Stowers & Barker, 2010). The coach supports the implementation of the steps, although the initiative lies with the learner. As such, important skills for an effective coach are observation, listening, and generating the right questions. At the end of a cycle, the effectiveness of the process will be assessed (Griffiths, 2005).

Additionally, although learners typically benefit from more experienced coaches, especially in academia (Stowers & Barker, 2010), other models emphasize that coach and learner are on the same hierarchical level (Griffiths, 2005).

How to Coach Without Being Direct?

Megan has just started as a trainee in the human resource department of a company in the technology industry. As part of the firm’s trainee program, every newcomer is provided with a coach: a more experienced employee from a different team who will help with challenging situations such as performance appraisal interviews. In Megan’s case, this is Brian, one of the firm’s human resource team leaders. Brian has been working for the company for about seven years now and will be trying to help Megan learn the ropes.

This is his second coaching assignment, and he has just had his first meeting with her. His approach was to first tell her a little bit about himself and then to try and get her to talk about her own motivations, perspectives, previous experiences, and so forth. He will then go on to work with her on improving her experiences with the interviews. The way he sees it, he is not there to teach her but to enable and motivate her to make the most out of her time as a trainee and of her opportunities for building her career.

Although the meeting was not unpleasant, Megan seemed to him a little intimidated. He was under the impression that Megan saw him less as a coach but more as a supervisor or boss: When he asked her about how her first appraisal interviews went, she seemed to try to present herself favorably. When he tried to find out whether she found anything problematic or challenging, her response was defensive. Consequently, Brian found it difficult to give her advice and was hesitant about making suggestions out of fear that she might understand them as directives.

In order to remedy the situation, Brian wants to make the next meeting more informal. Instead of meeting in his office, he will ask Megan to meet him for lunch. He will try to adopt a more casual tone and to make the meeting appear less structured. He hopes that this will help her realize that he is not a superior but a coach.

Although this example of coaching is taken from the business environment, it can also be found in other contexts such as academia (Stowers & Barker, 2010). Coaching usually has a certain set of skills or a personal or career goal as its focus (Stern, 2004), and its content is as such not as well-defined as in tutoring. Although longer-term relationships can develop, they are usually not as substantial as in mentoring interactions. The distinction between coaching and mentoring is, however, not always clear-cut: In time, Brian might well develop into a mentor for Megan. The goal of our example is to demonstrate the importance of the social context in instructional communication. It should become clear that this aspect is relevant in all of the communication situations discussed in this chapter.

Both Megan and Brian seem to be worried about the kind of impression they generate during their interaction. Megan wants to appear as competent and confident, and Brian as helpful and not too demanding. How the desire to maintain a certain kind of impression is played out in interaction has been the topic of the work of Irving Goffman. He introduced the notion of face that he defined as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself” (Goffman, 1967, p. 5). This would later become the basis for politeness theory, an influential framework that attempts to explain how interlocutors negotiate face linguistically (Brown & Levinson, 1987). This account defines certain communicative acts that threaten an interlocutor’s face wants – specifically the need for belonging and approval as positive face and the need for autonomy as negative face – as face-threatening acts. Because all individuals endeavor to maintain their face, and because communication is by its nature cooperative, people usually refrain from directly threatening their own or their interlocutor’s face.

This explains why Megan’s and Brian’s communication has been difficult: Whereas Megan wanted to maintain her own (positive) face by not admitting to problems in her new job, Brian was reluctant to threaten Megan’s (negative) face by making suggestions. Instead of avoiding a face threat completely, communicators often use politeness strategies to mitigate it. These linguistic strategies work by actively acknowledging the desire to respect the other’s face, for example, by phrasing requests as a question (granting autonomy) or by using in-group slang (emphasizing belonging). When Brian, the coach in our example, thinks about being more informal, he considers a politeness strategy that addresses Megan’s positive face. Brian might be reluctant to tell Megan directly, “You should really be open about what you think your most valuable skills are in the interviews.” Instead, he could include himself by saying, “I know the HR people. When I had my interviews, I found I could really be open about what my most valuable skills are, so maybe you should, too.”

How to Configure the Social Distance?

Facework plays an important role in instructional communication: Learners who perceive threat-reducing facework being performed by their instructor are more motivated (Kerssen-Griep, Hess, & Trees, 2003; Trad, Katt, & Neville Miller, 2014) and rate the instructor’s feedback as fairer and more useful (Trees, Kerssen-Griep, & Hess, 2009). Polite communicators are also perceived as being more trustworthy (Miller, Wu, & Ott, 2012; Trad et al., 2014), more competent (Jessmer & Anderson, 2001; Miller et al., 2012) and more likable (Brummernhenrich & Jucks, 2015; Jucks, Päuler, & Brummernhenrich, 2014). Polite learning materials can lead to higher learning gains (Schneider, Nebel, Pradel, & Rey, 2015; Wang et al., 2008), although some studies have not found this effect (McLaren, DeLeeuw, & Mayer, 2011). Advice that is phrased politely is evaluated more positively and can be more effective than blunt or aggravatingly face-threatening advice (Feng & Burleson, 2008; Feng & MacGeorge, 2010; MacGeorge, Lichtman, & Pressey, 2002). This is especially important in coaching in which the learner must accept that someone else (the coach) only wants to improve her or his performance (Stowers & Barker, 2010).

Whereas the use of politeness strategies varies with social distance (Holtgraves, 2005; Slugoski & Turnbull, 1988) and with the difference in power between the communicators (Holtgraves & Yang, 1992; Lee, 1993), speakers also use them to actively regulate these aspects of the relationship (Holtgraves, 2005). This shows that people not only use facework as a reaction to deal with face-threatening acts but also employ it more proactively. Hence, Brian could support his strategy of choosing a less formal context by using (especially positive) politeness strategies in order to emphasize a closer relationship and a smaller difference in power between Megan and him. Instead of more or less formally inviting Megan to the next meeting (“Megan, our next meeting is coming up. I propose 1 p.m. tomorrow. Please let me know if that fits your schedule.”), he will try something along the lines of “Megan, how about we two go grab some lunch tomorrow in place of our usual meeting? Does 1 p.m. sound all right to you?”

Although most instructional research has focused on the positive effects of politeness, some has cautioned against its unreflected use: Instructors sometimes avoid necessary instructional face threats such as corrections or lengthy explanations out of face considerations (Bromme et al., 2012; Person et al., 1995). Politeness can also make communication ambiguous (Bonnefon, Feeney, & De Neys, 2011). It seems likely, however, that in most cases, learners will be able to distinguish between the social and content functions of politely phrased instruction (Brummernhenrich, 2014; Brummernhenrich & Jucks, 2013).

Another social cue that can be used by instructors and that has been studied in conjunction with facework is immediacy. Immediacy is a set of nonverbal and paraverbal behaviors that are designed to reduce the perceived social distance between two interlocutors (Andersen, 1979) such as moving closer to the other person, orienting oneself in the other’s direction, smiling, eye contact, and other indications of interpersonal approach. The effects of using immediacy behaviors on motivation, learning, and perceptions of the teacher are similar to those of using facework (Kerssen-Griep & Witt, 2012, 2015; Witt & Kerssen-Griep, 2011). Similar effects to facework on perceptions and affective learning are also well-established. However, effects on cognitive learning outcomes are much smaller than on perceptions of interpersonal affect (Witt, Wheeless, & Allen, 2004).

Research has shown that facework and immediacy are related and interact in a complex manner as they influence student outcomes (Kerssen-Griep & Witt, 2012, 2015; Witt & Kerssen-Griep, 2011). For example, these researchers found that facework positively influenced learner motivation and perceptions of instructor competence and character, but only when it was combined with immediacy cues. When it was used alone, facework was sufficient for improving perceptions of mentoring, caring, and feedback fairness. However, in e-mail communication where nonverbal immediacy cues are unavailable, facework alone might be sufficient to achieve the desired effects on learners and influence motivation, learning, and positive personal perceptions (Trad et al., 2014).

Multiple Demands for Those who Teach: Summary and Directions for Future Research

Instructional communication in general poses multiple demands on those who teach (Jucks & Bromme, 2011). First, the content needs to be presented comprehensibly, which means it will be understandable for the specific recipient. This includes (a) gauging the recipient’s knowledge status and (b) adapting one’s wording (especially the usage of technical language) accordingly. We used an example of peer-to-peer tutoring to illustrate how tutors diagnose a tutee’s current state of understanding and an example of expert-layperson communication in which a faculty member advises an undergraduate in order to address the challenge of using technical language.

Second, instructional communication is a social activity in which the social motives people encounter during communication need to be addressed. Advising, tutoring, mentoring, and coaching are highly interactive, and as such the interpersonal interplay is especially relevant. Facework and immediacy are two central communicative factors that not only shape but also, in turn, are shaped by the social context of instruction. We outlined these aspects referring to coaching in the business sector. Providing an example of a mentor-mentee relationship, we illustrated the need to structure the communication and to take social roles into account when describing the communication between two individuals.

Future researchers should address both aspects: the conceptual dimension of instructional communication and the way the social dimension is addressed and encountered in the contexts of advising, tutoring, mentoring, and coaching. When doing so, mediated instructional settings need specific attention.

Finally, future researchers should focus on the interplay between conceptual and social aspects. Intellectual ability and motivation seem to be the two main dimensions on which tutors categorize their tutees (Derry & Potts, 1998). Hence, if a tutee’s motivation and ability are judged to be high, expert tutors might, for example, invest less effort in encouraging the student but spend more time discussing theoretical and more abstract topics (Derry & Potts, 1998). This might also hold for the other out-of-classroom contexts addressed in this chapter. Hence, one major challenge for research on teacher-student interactions is to address both issues at the same time and to shed light on how providing conceptual understanding is related to building up a supportive relationship between teacher and student.

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