Abstract

• The current study focused specifically on students’ perceptions of teacher-student interaction and their engagement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between students’ perceptions of teacher-student interaction and their engagement. Quantitative research method was used in this study. Thirty eight percent of fifth year students at Sagaing University of Education were selected as the participants of this study by using simple random sampling method. In this study, “Questionnaire for Students” was used to collect the required data. In this questionnaire, two instruments; instrument one which investigated the students’ perceptions of teacher-student interaction developed by the researcher and instrument two which investigated the perceptions of students on their engagement developed by Lam and Jimerson (2008). According to the results of the study, students’ perceptions on teachers’ dominant interaction, cooperation interaction, and submissive interaction dimension were high level and opposition interaction dimension was moderate level. For the students’ engagement, they perceived that affective engagement and cognitive engagement dimensions were high level and behavioural engagement dimension was moderate level. When examining the relationship between students’ perceptions of teacher-student interaction and their engagement, teachers’ dominant interaction (r= .415, p < 0.01) was positively and moderately correlated with students’ engagement, teachers’ cooperation interaction (r= .499, p < 0.01) was positively and moderately correlated with students’ engagement, teachers’ submissive interaction (r= .477, p < 0.01) was positively and moderately correlated with students’ engagement. Furthermore, teachers’ opposition interaction (r= .233, p < 0.01) was positively and low correlated with students’ engagement. This study suggested to fill three basic needs of students; competence, relatedness and autonomy.