‘GOOD TEACHER, BAD TEACHER : INVESTIGATING GOSSIP IN A WOMEN’S COLLEGE IN KUWAIT

Abstract

This paper investigated how and why female students at the English Department (TED) of the College of Basic Education in Kuwait frequently engage in evaluative discourse about their professors. The study also revealed key aspects on how evaluative information about professors is circulated and processed by students through different mediums, like social media, an online student forum, graffito on classroom tabletops, and so on. Utilizing sociolinguistic quantitative analysis, we gauged the frequency of using evaluative adjectives and how it affected the strength or validity of students’ judgments over professors and their teaching performances. Our findings indicated that there was a strong emphasis by students on course grades rather than knowledge or the learning experience resulting from attending college. In order to graduate with high grades students exert substantial efforts into choosing their preferred professor for a certain course. These efforts manifest themselves through gathering background information about professors to establish who according to them is a ‘bad teacher’ and who is a ‘good teacher’