Abstract

This study empirically investigated whether students’ satisfaction with and perceptions of credibility toward English teachers are higher when the contextual fitness of English teachers’ transformational leadership is high. The key contextual variable examined in this study was students’ English self-efficacy. In this research, the relationships of the students’ satisfaction and credibility with students’ intrinsic motivation to learn English were also investigated. A questionnaire survey was administered to first- and second-year high school students across seven districts in Daegu city, Korea. A total of 192 valid responses were collected. Cluster analysis was employed to examine the degree of fit between the levels of students’ English self-efficacy and the forms of English teachers’ transformational leadership. The results indicated that under the high levels of students’ English self-efficacy, students’ satisfaction with and credibility toward English teachers were also high when all dimensions of transformational leadership (i.e., individualized consideration, idealized influence, inspirational motivation, and intellectual stimulation) were strongly enacted as well as intellectual stimulation was emphasized more than the other dimensions. In contrast, when the degrees of students’ English self-efficacy were low, students’ satisfaction with and perceptions of teacher credibility were relatively high when individualized consideration, idealized influence, and inspirational motivation were emphasized more strongly than intellectual stimulation. The positive associations of the students’ satisfaction and credibility with students’ intrinsic motivation to learn English were also empirically confirmed. Finally, in the conclusion section of this paper, various implications for educational leadership and English learning were concretely summarized and proposed.

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