Teachers' Expectations An intercultural discursive investigation

A growing attention on the development of students¿ academic performance has been noticed among recent educational studies. Acknowledging the different results in these studies on how teacher-student relationships and teachers¿ expectations influence the students¿ success, the present study aimed at verifying (and clarifying) this correlation. The corpus consists of answers from a questionnaire provided by 10 (ten) ¿minority¿ high school teachers in Brazil and the United States: five Brazilian teachers of Portuguese and the same number of American teachers of English. The analysis was carried out based on Norman Fairclough¿s theory and method of Critical Discourse Analysis (2005, 1994, 1991) and on educational views on teachers¿ expectations. Overall, there were some similarities and some differences between the groups¿some were expected and some would constitute intriguing discoveries. Hence, this study is addressed to teachers, professors and those interested in the potential effects the teacher-student relationship may have in students¿ academic achievement.