BUILDING GROUP RAPPORT IN INSTITUTIONAL FACE TO-FACE INTERACTIONS: AN EXPLORATION OF KOREAN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM DISCOURSE

When people are engaged in any interaction, they are likely to respond to each other's verbal and nonverbal cues. Such responsiveness is a crucial factor in the notion of rapport. In this paper, the author posits that the same human dynamics that govern everyday conversations are at play in the context of institutional conversations, specifically among participants of classroom discourse. The purpose of this study is to develop key aspects of "conversational involvement" (Duranti, 1986; Goodwin, 1986; Gumperz, 1982; Tannen, 1985) as group rapport within language classroom discourse, and to provide observable phenomena, including participants’ verbal and nonverbal cues, that characterize rapport in informal and formal conversation. This study involved nine participants: a Korean professor teaching an elementary Korean language course at a major U.S. university and eight undergraduate students whose first language was English. Three fifty-minute classroom sessions were videotaped, and segments that illustrated rapport-facilitating behaviors by the teacher and students were transcribed and qualitatively analyzed. The frequency of the teacher's display of verbal and nonverbal cues that appeared to foster rapport was documented. The study found that in this classroom, akin to in everyday conversation, the participants demonstrated their desire to listen to, be responsive to, and be influenced by the other individuals in the group. The participants were part and parcel of achieving their goals in the classroom. They created a particular alignment to achieve their goals and signaled that they were involved in the interaction. As a result, the students would engage more with the target language through participation in classroom activities, which is a key outcome of building good rapport.