How to measure self esteem of students that is impacted by spoken language?

[saya]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone had an idea about a linguistic tool that can help with measuring self-esteem in children. I also am interested to know if there is any linguistic measure developed to evaluate teachers speech in classrooms.

I hope someone can assist as I have been looking around and am not able to find much..
Thanks in Advance

[Daniel]

Are you interested in linguistic correlates of self esteem for the purpose of linguistic research?

Or are you looking for a practical way to measure self esteem?

There may be linguistic factors, but I would suggest looking at psychology research instead of linguistics narrowly for a practical answer. The (United States) NIH (National Institute of Health) has various surveys/packages designed to measure development, behavior and cognitive/psychological status for things like language development, depression, and so forth. These are often available for free online. They sometimes take relatively extensive testing (maybe an hour or two?) and are done individually, but they are used by psychologists and medical doctors to evaluate certain outcomes or conditions, and are widely tested and standardized (at least within the US context). That approach, or something like it, will be much more reliable and practical than looking for potential linguistic correlates of self esteem. They are also very often used for academic research too, not just practical applications. I don't know if there is a specific test battery designed for self esteem (I've only encountered these in passing for my own research, such as measuring memory abilities), but you probably can get some information that way, or at least think about how to design your own materials.

[saya]

Are you interested in linguistic correlates of self esteem for the purpose of linguistic research?

Or are you looking for a practical way to measure self esteem?

These are often available for free online. They sometimes take relatively extensive testing (maybe an hour or two?) and are done individually, but they are used by psychologists and medical doctors to evaluate certain outcomes or conditions, and are widely tested and standardized  That approach, or something like it, will be much more reliable and practical than looking for potential linguistic correlates of self esteem.

Yes, I am actually looking for how linguistics correlates with self-esteem particularly in a classroom setting. I was interested in the impact of teacher's verbal communication on students self-esteem since I noticed such occurrence when teaching myself.
So I want to evaluate teachers speech in a classroom and its effects on students to be a bit more exact. I know about the self-esteem measure developed by Marshall Rosenberg for children which again is purely a psychology based questionnaire.
I was wondering if this type of research was plausible, I want to combine the two areas together to show their importance.

[Daniel]

It doesn't seem to me that you can start by measuring self esteem by linguistic methods. Instead, you can measure self esteem some other way, then look at linguistic correlates.

You could do that either in general terms, for example measuring many variables such as frequency of pronoun use or the length/number of conversational turns, which might have some indirect relationship with self esteem. Or you could do it by more direct means once you establish particularly relevant variables. Probably that would be through some approach along the lines of discourse analysis, etc.

I don't have many specific suggestions to make, although you can probably find relevant research for other similar topics. For example, depression is a widely researched topic, and you might find some suggestions for starting points (methodology, linguistic features to consider, etc.) there.

Even once all of this is established, I would be surprised if the relationship is more than just a correlation-- self esteem possibly creating certain effects in speech. It is unlikely that they will be so closely correlated that you actually turn that around and measure self esteem by it, although that would certainly be an interesting result.

[saya]

I am curious to see the impact but since I am crunched on time I am going to research on pragmatics (politeness) to see how it influence students compliance and then self-esteem.

Thank you once again for your time and advice.

[Daniel]

I just saw this, an announcement for a new book series, which might interest you either as references (whenever the first volumes become available!) or as somewhere to submit your research later. Maybe searching for some work by the editors of the series and their bibliographies could point you in the right direction:

https://www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/language-mind/2018/05/29/new-book-series-language-discourse-and-mental-health/