Approaching Foreign Language Enjoyment from Teacher Verbal Immediacy: A Case from Grade-6 Primary Students in Jiangsu, China

Students’ foreign language enjoyment can be greatly enhanced if a harmonious interpersonal relationship between teachers and students is developed. This research aims to study an important element of the harmonious interpersonal relationship, which is teacher verbal immediacy. Verbal immediacy includes starting conversations with students, commending students, calling over the students’ names, and giving feedback on students’ work. This research analyzed how teachers’ verbal immediacy affects primary school students’ foreign language enjoyment levels by adopting the FLE scale, classroom observation, and rapport-management models. Teachers’ verbal immediacy, belonging to external factors, influences students’ motivation of learning English in 4 domains including the illocutionary domain, the discourse domain, the participation domain and the stylistic domain.