The quality of teacher-student relationships greatly affects students’ academic life. Students need to be recognized by their teacher. One way through which such need may be fulfilled is receiving strokes (teacher attention). In a broad sense, stroke is known to be a unit of human recognition (Berne, 1988). Accordingly, the current mixed- methods study aims to investigate the differences among English, Persian, and Arabic school teachers in Iran pertaining to their stroking behavior and to see how the three groups of teachers differ in this regard. To fulfill the first aim, 300 eighth-grade female students completed an 18-item questionnaire and the questionnaire data were analyzed through one-way ANOVA. The results revealed that Arabic teachers stroke students more than English and Persian teachers. As for the second aim, nine English, Persian and Arabic teachers were each observed for three sessions. The analysis of the observations demonstrated that English teachers outstroke students. Finally, these findings have been discussed in the context of language instruction.

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