On the Effect of Teachers' Ethnic Awareness on Learners' Achievement: The Case of Iranian High School Students
Parviz Alavinia, Asadollah Aazam Leilan

Abstract
Being informed by the great repercussions awareness of ethological axioms would produce for education, in general and ethnically susceptible arenas, in particular, the researchers in the current study strived to investigate Iranian high school teachers’ perceptions of their strengths and deficiencies for working with and meeting the needs of students from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. In simpler terms, the study at hand was after finding the effect of high school teachers' ethnic awareness on learners' achievement. To this end, 20 high school teachers (both Kurdish and Turkish) along with 381 (Turkish and Kurdish) second grade high school students were chosen as the study participants. The subject  process was carried out in a range of different high schools across two cities in West Azerbaijan, i.e. Miandoab and Boukan. The major data collection instrument utilized was scale of awareness and personal beliefs developed by Ladson-Billings (1994a,b), which was based on Alabama Quality Teaching Standards and comprised 22 Likert-type items, intended to tap the participants' perceived awareness of the requirements for teaching children from diverse cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, to be able to tap the influence of teachers’ ethnic awareness on learners’ general achievement, the learners’ scores on the final English achievement test were gathered. As the final analysis of results through one-way ANOVA and LSD test revealed, the learners’ performance was found to be highly affected by the teachers' level of ethnic awareness.

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