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Rapport Building in Language Instruction: A Microanalysis of

the Multiple Resources in Teacher Talk

Article in Language and Education · July 2007

DOI: 10.2167/le658.0

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Rapport Building in Language Instruction:
A Microanalysis of the Multiple Resources
in Teacher Talk
Hanh thi Nguyen
Hawaii Pacific University, Honolulu, USA

Current guidelines on teacher – student rapport, while providing helpful suggestions,

fail to address the question of how rapport building can be achieved in contextu-
alised classroom interaction in which a balance needs to be reached between rapport
and instructional tasks. Using discourse analysis informed by a conversation analytic
approach and bringing in the notions of face (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and partici-
pation framework (Goffman, 1981), this paper examines in close detail how rapport
is concretely accomplished in the moment-to-moment interaction of one ESOL (En-
glish for Speakers of Other Languages) grammar class. The teacher is found to use
various interactional resources that allow him to simultaneously orient to the imme-
diate instructional tasks and the social and interpersonal dimension of the interaction
with the students. Microanalysis of one calling-to-attention sequence, two correction
sequences, and one summarisation sequence shows that the teacher strategically inter-
weaves rapport building into instruction in order to facilitate the instructional tasks
at hand. The teacher also successfully engages students’ co-participation in creating
and maintaining rapport. This analysis offers insights into the social processes in the
language classroom, as well as suggests practical pedagogical implications.

doi: 10.2167/le658.0

Keywords: rapport, teacher – student relationship, language teaching, teacher

talk, classroom discourse

Introduction Mentioned in different methods.

Building teacher – student rapport is a key aspect of teaching. A comfortable
classroom climate is encouraged because the belief is that students can learn bet-
ter in such an environment. In language teaching in particular, Krashen’s (1985)
well-accepted Affective Filter Hypothesis specifies that comprehensible input
can become intake only when the student has a lowered affective filter, i.e. when
they feel motivated, confident, and comfortable. In Krashen and Terell’s Natural
Approach (1983), the teacher aims to create a friendly classroom atmosphere to
promote learning. In the same spirit, Tsui (1996) writes: ‘establishing a good re-
lationship with students is extremely important in creating a conducive learning
atmosphere in the classroom’ (1996: 164). Similarly, Doff (1988) highlights the
importance of ‘social language’ or ‘chatting’ as an opportunity for the teacher to
‘[establish] contact with the class, and helps students to feel relaxed and ready to
learn’ (p. 224, emphasis in original). Nunan (1988, 1990) implies in his checklist
for classroom observation that good classroom management involves creating

0950-0782/07/04 284-20 $20.00/0

C 2007 H.T. Nguyen
LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Vol. 21, No. 4, 2007

284
 Rapport Building in Language Instruction 285

a positive classroom atmosphere. A good teacher – student relationship opens

up a comfortable space for more learning opportunities, allowing students to
increase their participation in the classroom as a community of practice (Lave
& Wenger, 1991), which ultimately leads to higher achievement. It is thus more
than obvious speculation that good teacher – student rapport enhances language
learning.
Due to its importance, numerous textbooks on teacher training have discussed
the issue of how teachers can build rapport with their students in the classroom.
In the educational literature, most guidelines on how to construct a positive
how to build
environment for learning (which includes building rapport) mention the estab-
rapport
lishment of support, warmth and openness (e.g. Borich, 2000), the ability to be
friendly, genuine, positive and attentive to what the students say (e.g. Burden
& Byrd, 1999), the use of informality and humour to close the distance between
the teacher and students and make the students more involved in the learning
process (e.g. Bianco-Mathis & Chalofsky, 1996; Burden & Byrd, 1999; Hill, 1988;
Kougl, 1997). Brown (1994) provides perhaps one of the most explicit guidelines
for building rapport with students in a language classroom. He recommends
that teachers can establish a relationship of trust and respect with their students
by (1) showing interest in individual students, (2) giving feedback on individual
student’s progress, (3) inviting students to express their thoughts and feelings,
(4) valuing and respecting students’ ideas, (5) sharing humour with students
but not ridiculing them, (6) working with students as a team and not against
them and (7) expressing true happiness when students succeed (p. 421).
While providing helpful suggestions for teachers as to how to establish
this important aspect of classroom interaction, these prescriptive guidelines on
teacher – student rapport fail to address two fundamental issues. First, whereas
a combination of instructional and social functions in the classroom is appealing,
it has an apparent, inherent paradox. The instructional goals require the teacher
to perform many acts that are face-threatening (Brown & Levinson, 1987), such
as requesting attention, calling on students to answer and correcting students’
paradox mistakes (Cazden, 1988). In carrying out these teaching tasks, the teacher is
teacher's positioned as having higher status than the students in the power relationship,
role which can potentially create distance between the teacher and students.1 On the
other hand, the nurturing of rapport requires the teacher to be friendly, non-
imposing, and close to the students. In order to be effective, the teacher needs
to be able to build rapport with the students in the context of the asymmet-
ric power relationship and the pedagogical goals of the classroom. Doing this
involves reconciling two separate but coexisting aspects of the teacher’s role,
namely, the instructional and the interpersonal. Neither of these two alone can
be beneficial to learning, and at any given moment in teacher – student inter-
action, the teacher needs to find a point of balance that works best for the task at
hand. The second issue is that despite its important role in the classroom, rap-
port remains to be one of the most ‘slippery’ concepts in classroom management
(Brown, 1994). It is elusive because it is an abstract and general notion and yet
it has to be cumulatively constructed in specific and contextualised interactions
among the participants. At their best, current guidelines for teachers can list de-
contextualised recommendations regarding how rapport can be built, leaving
wide open the question of how to ‘bring to life’ the abstract notion of rapport
 286 Language and Education

or, in other words, how a teacher can create, maintain and renew rapport in
ongoing interaction with the students. For example, saying that using humour
can help establish a positive classroom atmosphere for rapport building does
not specify how humour can be brought into the sequential organisation of class-
room interaction – at what moment, in what action and in what context. These
are questions about the actual practices of classroom interaction that a novice
teacher, or any teacher, has to resolve in order to achieve rapport, a general,
abstract notion, with students.
In this paper I address the above issues through concrete examples of
teacher – student interaction. I aim to qualitatively examine how rapport build-
def. ing is constructed in contextualised classroom talk. The notion of ‘rapport’ is
rapport understood here as a positive social relationship characterised by mutual trust
and emotional affinity.2 While there are many ways to build mutual trust and
emotional affinity in social interaction, in this paper I focus the observations
of rapport building on occasions in teacher – student talk in which there are
tokens of laughter and/or smiling – observable resources that conversational
participants have been shown to frequently utilise in order to pursue intimacy
and affinity (Bell, 2005, 2007; Jefferson et al., 1987; Norrick, 1993; Straehle, 1993).
In exploring the question of how rapport is built in specific moments of teacher
– student interaction, I aim to uncover how the teacher resolves the two con-
flicting aspects of his/her role, i.e. being simultaneously friendly (interpersonal)
and task-oriented (instructional).

Rapport Building in the Classroom

Social interaction in the classroom has been characterised as a form of insti-
tutional talk (Seedhouse, 1996; van Lier, 2001), and a defining feature of institu-
tional talk is goal-orientedness (Drew & Heritage, 1992). The general goal of a class
is for the teacher to develop new knowledge, values and skills in the students.
At specific moments, this goal manifests itself in specific instructional tasks for
the teacher such as organising the class, correcting students’ answers, answering
students’ questions, etc. Another frequently noted aspect of institutional talk is
the presence of social chat, or ‘small talk’, alongside the main ‘business’, or task-
oriented talk (Erickson & Schultz, 1982; Holmes, 2003; Mirivel & Tracy, 2005;
Nguyen, 2001; Schegloff, 1998; Thornborrow, 2003). Social chat in institutional
interaction ‘enacts social cohesiveness, reduces inherent threat values of social
contact, and helps to structure social interaction’ (Coupland, 2003). As such, it
can contribute to the maintenance of rapport. When participants relax their in-
stitutional roles and engage in social chat, they are renewing and strengthening
the social fabric that defines their relationship.
Social talk between teachers and students has been well documented in em-
pirical research (Cadorath & Harris, 1998; Edwards & Westgate, 1994; Lin, 2001;
Matlock, 2003; Ulichny, 1996). The tendency of these studies is to suggest a
dichotomy between ‘instructional’ and ‘social’ talk as two separate interac-
tional processes. For example, Ulichny (1996) notes that ‘small talk’ between the
teacher and the students took place before the beginning of the lesson ‘proper’,
and Cadorath and Harris (1998) emphasise the distinction between ‘planned
language’ and ‘unplanned language’, with the latter being ‘authentic’ discourse
Rapport Building in Language Instruction 287

that can promote rapport. Similarly, Markee (2005) recognises ‘on-task’ and
‘off-task’ as different speech exchange systems in student-student interaction,
and this ‘on-task/off-task’ distinction is also observed by Thornborrow (2003)
in her analysis of children’s peer interaction in the classroom. However, some
other researchers recognise that humorous talk, e.g. jokes, may not stand aside
as separate communication units, but are part of the ‘working transactions’ of
the classroom, functioning to accomplish the instructional tasks in an effective
way (Edwards & Westgate, 1994; Lin, 2001). In this sense, rapport can be con-
structed through instructions and not only in isolated bubbles of ‘small talk’ and
‘unplanned language’. Further, rapport-building is not just a superfluous layer
of interaction outside of instruction – it is a part of instruction. As Kramsch
(1985) pointed out, no classroom interaction is either purely instructional or
entirely social, and teacher – student interaction should be viewed as a means
of enriching the social context for learning.
This study aims to extend this line of research and provide further under-
standing about teachers’ simultaneous management of rapport and instruc-
tion in classroom discourse. Whereas some of the researchers mentioned above
(Edwards & Westgage, 1994; Lin, 2001) have paid attention to the integrative
role of humour in instruction, to date, there has not been a systematic, detailed
study that examines the interactional resources employed by teachers to build
rapport with students while performing instructional tasks. Taking this as its
central concern, this study hopes to make a step further towards a better under-
standing about one of the central concerns in education – the social interactional
processes that take place between teachers and their students.

The Study
Objectives
The purpose of this study is to understand how rapport building is accom-
plished during instruction in a language class. More specifically, I will analyse
the specific interactional resources that a teacher employed to achieve both in-
structional tasks and rapport with the students as well as the effects of rapport
building on the performance of the tasks.

Data and method of analysis

The data are from an advanced ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Lan-
guages) grammar class aiming to prepare students for college in the United
States. The class was 55 minutes long, and the videotaping started 15 minutes
into the lesson. The students were 16 international adults from various Asian
and Central American countries. The teacher was an experienced, full-time
teacher and was considered by his colleagues to be highly competent, creative
and humorous.3 On the day of the recording, the class was working on gerunds
and infinitives, the passive voice and prepositions. In the part on passive voice,
the students were given a paragraph about lasers and fibre optics. They had to
work in pairs/groups to change at least six verbs into the passive voice, and to
give good reasons for the changes.4 For each grammar point, the teacher first
asked the students to work in pairs or groups. He then walked around the room
 288 Language and Education

helping and checking the pairs/group work, and finally called the whole class
together to check and discuss the answers.
The analysis in this paper is informed by the conversation analytic approach to
the study of talk in social interaction (Sacks, 1995; Sacks et al., 1974), and incorpo-
rates the notions of participation framework (Goffman, 1981) and face (Brown
& Levinson, 1987) in order to focus on the management of teacher – student
relationship in discourse. Influenced by the conversation analytic approach, I
treat social interaction (even when it has been transcribed) as a live, unfolding
event instead of something given and completed. My analysis aims to interpret
talk from the participants’ perspectives and looks for evidence of these inter-
pretations in the participants’ conduct in talk. By observing how the teacher
and students achieve sequentially ordered talk, I hope to understand how they
collaboratively and concretely enact general, abstract aspects of social structure
such as role relationship.
According to Goffman, when a participant produces an utterance, s/he in-
like a
limited dexes a footing, i.e. a stance, an alignment, or projected self for him/herself and
area in for the other participants. The production of an utterance thus creates a par-
which the ticipation framework for those involved. It is by constructing these participation
participats frameworks in talk that teachers and students establish and renew their relation-
can
interact ships. Also following Goffman, a shift in footing, and thus a shift in participation
in certain framework, often involves a change of pitch, volume, rhythm, stress, tonal qual-
ways. ity, or linguistic code (dialect or language). Along similar lines, with the notion
Like the of contextualisation cues, Gumperz (1992) specifies that speakers use cues such as
boundarie
s? prosody, paralinguistic signs, code choice and choice of lexical forms including
formulaic expressions in order to signal the contexts for how their utterance is
to be interpreted. The analysis of these cues will help us see how teachers and
students index varying roles through talk.
Also very important for the analysis of rapport building in instruction is
key Brown’s and Levinson’s notion of face. In social interaction, people frequently
concept: threaten each other’s faces, including negative face, i.e. the desire to be free
face-
threatening
from imposition, and positive face, i.e. the desire to be appreciated. One way
acts to mitigate face-threatening acts is to use positive politeness strategies, which
is often direct, reflecting and renewing a close relationship, or camaraderie,
between the speaker and the hearer. Positive politeness strategies are in contrast
to negative politeness strategies, where the speaker uses a formal, polite formula
to reduce the degree of face-threat, reflecting and renewing a more distant
relationship between the speaker and the hearer. In classroom discourse, by
looking at the politeness strategies that teachers and students use to handle
face-threatening acts, one can infer the kind of relationships they are building.
The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth study of how rapport
building takes place in instruction. In order to understand the nature of this
phenomenon, it is essential to carefully inspect single cases before more general
observations can be made (also see Schegloff, 1993). I will therefore begin the
investigation with specific moments of situated interaction in one class and aim
to make tangible the interactional processes involved in the actual realisation of
a notion as general and ‘slippery’ as rapport. This study, then, is an exploration
of a tricky phenomenon familiar to language teachers, namely, dealing with
both affective and instructional aspects in the classroom.
Rapport Building in Language Instruction 289

In addition to being in the class and recording it, I watched the videotape
several times. It soon became noticeable to me that there were moments in
the interaction when the teacher and students seemed to orient not just to an
immediate teaching/learning task, but also to some other social, interpersonal
meanings, as exemplified in Excerpt 1 below.
In this segment of talk, the teacher (T) is asking a question to the whole class,
and Ellen (E)5 volunteers to answer.

Excerpt 1
1 T: WHO CHANGED THAT ONE.
2 (0.2)
3 E: raises hand with arm fully extended
4 T: Ellen.
5 (0.2)
6 T: You already did one, [didn’t you? You showing- YOU SAID
[waves arm downward
YOU DIDN’T WANNA BE ON THE CAMERA NOW
YOU’RE SHOWING OFF FOR THE [↑↓CAMERA.
7 E: smiles [ ◦ I want to.◦
8 Ss: heh [heh heh heh
9 T: [heh heh heh
10 T: Okay. Ellen.
With the question in line 1, T initiates the instructional task of selecting a student
to give the answer to the whole class. E raises her hand. T accepts her bid to
answer (line 4) but then rejects her on the explicit account that she had already
done another sentence (line 6). Giving equal chance for students to speak in
class is what teachers often do and thus T’s talk at this point reflects his teacher
role. However, T immediately changes his speech volume and accuses E of
‘showing off’ for the camera, turning her task-oriented action into something
that relates to the interpersonal and emotional aspects of social interaction. This
accusation creates amusement among the students, including E herself (lines
7–9), which is clear evidence that they also recognise the phatic meaning in
T’s talk. Through these contextualisation cues (Gumperz, 1992), T seems to be
indexing himself and the students as close acquaintances, for whom teasing of
this sort is acceptable and desirable. In Goffman’s (1981) terms, T has switched
his footing from being a teacher to being a friendly peer. After this, in line 10, T
reaffirms his call on E to give the answer, thus resuming his task-oriented stance.
Evidently, the immediate instructional task has been achieved after T’s turn in
line 4. However, the interaction from lines 6–9 does not seem to be redundant, or
‘off-task’. Specifically, it should be noted that T’s call on E can potentially cast the
other students in the role of passive over-hearers (or even non-participants). The
shared laughter across the classroom at this very point brings the participants
closer together in the creation of a pleasant social atmosphere and engages their
attention, thus enabling T to prepare more effectively for the upcoming task of
checking one student’s answer.
In the remainder of this paper, I present examples of moments in classroom
interaction in which there was an intricate interweaving of rapport building and
290 Language and Education

instructional task accomplishment. Particularly, I will focus on the sequences of

calling-to-attention, correction, and summarisation.

Findings
The calling-to-attention sequence
In excerpt 2 below, the teacher called the attention of the students in order to
check the answers together after the students had finished group work.
Excerpt 2
1 T: OK EVERYBODY,
2 (1.0) T claps twice
3 T: CAN WE (.) COME TOGETHER AS A ↑↓GROUP AND GO
OVER ↑↓THIS,
4 (2.5)
5 T: WE HAVE GERUNDS AND INFINITIVES (1.0)
↑↓ <WAITING> FOR US.
6 A: smiles
7 (2.0)
8 T: They don’t want <to wait >(.) anymore.
9 (1.0)
10 T: They’re tired of (.) <waiting>.
11 (4.5)
12 T: ATTENTION?
13 (.)
14 T: ((with French accent)) ATTENTION?
15 (4.0) Several students stop working and look up
16 T: FLIGHT ONE THIRTEEN WILL ↓NOW BE LEAVING.
17 Ss: 0 heh heh heh0
18 T: ri -hhh- t.
19 T: IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH (.) DO WE WANT TO
CHANGE ANY OF THE SENTENCES.
Note. 113 is the class number.
From lines 1–5, T calls the students to attention and displays a clear orientation
to the instructional task and his teacher footing: he gives a command (in the form
of a question) addressing the whole class through the use of pronouns (‘we’,
‘us’), clapping hands, using high volume, and mentioning the lesson content
(‘gerunds’, ‘infinitives’). However, as T does this, he also blends in an interest-
ing twist of language use. In this lesson, the class is working on the grammatical
structure of ‘verb + gerund/infinitive’, which belongs to the content, or the
‘substantive meaning’ (Bellack et al., 1966). What T is doing, namely, calling
to attention to end one activity and begin another, is part of classroom man-
agement, or a ‘structuring move’ (Bellack et al., 1966). The unusual language
use here is that T is employing the grammatical structure within the substantive
meaning of the lesson to perform a structuring move (line 5). T’s creative and
unexpected language use is signalled by his emphatic stress and slowed speech
rate for the gerund ‘waiting’, and this is recognised by a student in the first
 Rapport Building in Language Instruction 291

row, evidenced by his smile (line 6). With no response from the other students,
T continues this technique with normal speech volume in his next two turns
(lines 8, 10). Then after a rather long pause (line 11) still with not much response
from the students, T switches back to features of talk that contextualised his
utterance as having a teacher’s authority: he increases his speech volume again,
and uses a command to perform a structuring move (line 12). And still with
no further reaction from the students, T repeats his call for attention (line 14).
But this time he adds a French accent to it. This variation in the pronuncia-
tion of ‘attention’ effectively enables T to avoid repeating the same call twice
and thus run the risk of sounding pressing or impatient, and yet the request
is still made relevant, still allowing him to achieve his instructional goal. By
this time, several students begin to look up, orienting to T’s call to attention.
T subsequently lets another long silence go by (line 15), perhaps to give the
students some more time to get ready. Up to this point, it can be said that T
has accomplished his instructional task of getting the students’ attention. Yet in
line 16, T carries the playfulness further by unexpectedly switching to flight-
attendant talk through the means of various contextualisation cues: he turns
the class number into a flight number and uses a formulaic expression often
heard on airplanes, ‘FLIGHT ONE THIRTEEN WILL ↓NOW BE LEAVING.’ In
a language classroom context, this footing shift is out of the ordinary, and it is
recognised by both T and the students as funny, evidenced by their laughing in
lines 17 and 18. Note here that the students laugh first, then T joins in. Having
the recipient to laugh first is a sign of the speaker’s success in getting an accep-
tance for the speaker’s invitation to laugh (West, 1984). As noted above, shared
laughter can increase the participants’ affiliation and intimacy (Bell, 2005, 2007;
Jefferson et al., 1987; Norrick, 1993; Straehle, 1993), and thus T has successfully
created a moment of rapport building with his students. Further, with this joint
laughter, T and the students can achieve a collaborative understanding of what
is going on in the classroom, which is crucial for this moment in class interaction
– they are moving from independent group work into a whole-class activity. It
is precisely after this point that T goes on with a new task-related question in
line 19. It is important to note that back in line 15, T already had the students’
attention. The function of the talk from line 16 to line 18, then, seems to be to
establish an active meeting point of attention for the whole class. In a nutshell,
T has not only achieved his instructional task, but he has also brought himself
and the students closer together and opened up a comfortable moment for the
students as they get ready for the next task.
Calling for students’ attention is what teachers do very often. Yet this could
example of be a highly face-threatening act for the students because in essence, the teacher
face- is asking the students to stop whatever they are doing and move on to some-
threatening
act
thing else that the teacher wants them to do. In the example above, the teacher
(imposing uses various interactional resources, including verbal and non-verbal cues, to
something) make his immediate task of calling for attention less imposing, thus less face
threatening for the students.

The correction sequence

In Excerpt 3 the teacher was checking Stephanie (S)’s answer about a passive
voice construction, which also contained a mispronunciation of the word ‘fibre’.
292 Language and Education

Excerpt 3
1 T: And how about the last sentence, in this paragraph, should we
change it?
2 (.)
3 T: Stephanie? >You wanna try it<?
4 S: Lasers can be protected by using feeber or glass (.) uh.
5 T: ↑↓ >0 fibres0 <. ↑↓ >0 Feebers0 <.
6 smiles
7 S: Smiles
8 (0.2)
9 T: fibre.
10 (.)
11 T: There’re two ways to change it.
In line 4, S gives a response to T’s initiation (line 1) but she mispronounces
‘fibre’ as ‘feeber’. In alignment with his role as a teacher, T focuses on this
mistake and provides correction. Here we see that T waits until S speaks past
the trouble point, and takes a turn in a softer voice in line 5. He pronounces
both the correct form and the error with a smile, which perhaps leads S to also
smile. In the classroom context, after a student’s answer it is highly relevant for
the teacher to give feedback, i.e. orienting to the IRF (Initiation – Response –
Feedback) sequence widely recognised in classroom discourse (Mehan, 1979;
Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975).6 Yet in line 5, T does not provide any judgment
of the correctness of S’s answer. It is only after S’s smile (line 7) and after
a little pause (line 8) that T gives the right pronunciation (line 9) and the
answer regarding the passive voice (line 11). The first observation is that T
may be withholding the answer in order to implicitly elicit S’s self-correction, a
strategy commonly used by language teachers (Lightbown & Spada, 1993). Yet,
more importantly, I propose that the turns from line 5 through line 7 serve an
additional function that is beyond getting the task of correction done.
This function becomes clear when we examine T’s talk in line 5 closely. It seems
that T is drawing S’s attention to the source of the problem (the pronunciation of
the word ‘fibre’) by saying it in two different ways. He utters both the correct item
‘fibre’ and the incorrect item ‘feeber’ with stress and higher pitch accent. Higher
pitch accent associated with stress has been found to mark new information
(Chafe, 1994; Wennerstrom, 2001), so it seems that T is presenting both forms
as new. Also, he produces them side by side, with equal stress, which seems
to mark them as comparable items. At this point in the interaction T is making
no distinction between the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ pronunciations for ‘fibre’.
As a native speaker, T knows which pronunciation is correct and which one is
wrong. It is, most plausibly, the student who does not know this. Yet by using
the contextualisation cues of intonation, voice volume, speech rate, and facial
expression, T is indexing the voice of the one who is confused. Simultaneously,
his accompanying smile signals a tease. He is jokingly shifting his footing into
that of the student. I submit that in doing so, T is conveying that he is with the
student; he is on her side in this pronunciation problem. Only after having done
this, and also after giving S a chance to self-correct (a pause in line 8) does T offer
the correct pronunciation (line 9), with falling, confirming intonation, orienting
Rapport Building in Language Instruction 293

to the immediate instructional task of providing feedback, thus stepping back

into his footing as a teacher.
The playfulness in the talk between T and S from lines 5 to 7 has a very im-
portant effect on T’s subsequent correction in line 9. While correction is highly
face-threatening to the recipient, T’s playful footing shift serves to maintain a
close relationship between T and the student. This point is further highlighted
when we contrast this segment with another instance (Excerpt 4), where a dif-
ferent student had the same pronunciation confusion as S, but there was an
absence of rapport-oriented talk.

Excerpt 4
1 J: Is this (.) feeber or fibre? =
2 T: = fibre.
3 (3.0)
A difference between this excerpt and excerpt 3 is that here the student (J)
directly asks for the right pronunciation, and she is not performing in front of
the whole class. Possibly there is not as much face threat to the student as in
excerpt 3, and that is why T gives the answer immediately. His turn even latches
onto the end of the student’s turn, showing no hesitation on his (T’s) part in
providing the correct form.
Softening these face-threatening acts was not the only way the teacher in
the data maintained rapport with the students. In an extensive teacher-single
student correction move in front of the whole class (excerpt 5), he succeeded in
engaging the whole class’ attention by the use of various interactional resources
that not only oriented to the task at hand, but also to the close relationship
between him and the students.

Excerpt 5
1 T: Tell me how you changed it.
2 (4.5)
3 C: ((reads from own notes)) ↑↓New challenge. (.) has been creating,
4 T: <New challenge:s>,
5 writes ‘New challenges’ on blackboard
6 C: has been. =
7 T: = ha:ve,
8 writes ‘have’ on blackboard, smiling
9 (1.2)
10 C: [been
11 T: [<been created>,
12 writes ‘been created’ on blackboard
13 C: have been creating (.) and <presenting>,
14 (1.2) T stops writing on board, looks at C
15 C: by[:::
16 looking down at her own notes
17 T: [still looking at C, shifts weight onto one leg heavily, moves hand
18 out of pocket [puts hand on hip, body moves rhythmically, making faces
19 Ss: [heh heh heh
294 Language and Education

20 T: [WAIT WAIT WAIT OH ((whistles four notes)) =

21 Ss: [heh heh
22 C: = Alright.
23 T: I want passive voice.
24 (1.0)
25 T: But I hear <creating> and <presenting>
26 shows teeth in a frozen expression,
looking at C
27 (3.5)
28 C: have been created =
29 T: = Thank you,
In line 3, C misses the plural marker for ‘challenges’, at which point T repeats
her words but with the correct plural form and additional stress on and
lengthening of the plural marker, i.e. providing a recast (Long, 1996; Lyster &
Ranta, 1997). This is a subtle way of correction, because the act of correcting is
only signalled by repetition and paralinguistic features. A second mistake by C
is the misuse of ‘have’ as the singular form ‘has’ (line 6), which T corrects with
the same recast technique. In line 13, C makes a mistake with the passive voice
construction – she uses the suffix -ing instead of -ed. At precisely this point,
T breaks off the ongoing rhythm of ‘student’s answer – teacher’s copying of
the answer on the board’, and lets a period of silence go by (line 14).7 This
non-verbal action seems to be similar to mid-turn ‘hitches’ or cut-offs found in
ordinary conversation that serve to catch the recipient’s attention (Goodwin,
1980, 1981). Indeed, T’s discontinuation of his echoing pattern here seems to
signal to C that her answer has some problem. Not looking up, C prolongs her
pronunciation of the preposition ‘by:::’ (line 15), thus holding the floor while
hesitating to produce the next part of the structure. Arguably, her hesitation
here could be a sign that she recognises T’s indication of a problem in her
answer. During this time, T does a series of non-verbal acts that trigger laughter
from the other students (lines 17–19). His non-verbal acts, however, are not seen
by C, who is looking down at her notes. Only after he has received the reaction
from the other students does T resort to vocal effect, which is now accessible
to C: he explicitly asks her to stop, ‘WAIT, WAIT, WAIT OH’ and whistles four
notes (line 20).
The design of this turn is worth examining further. First, T’s request for C
to stop is done in a very direct way: loud volume with a bare command that
is repeated several times. Second, it is followed by T’s whistling. On the one
hand, the whistle is distinct from the verbal channel and can be heard as another
‘hitch’ in the turn, functioning to catch the recipients’ attention (Goodwin, 1980,
1981), and thus adds strength to the request to stop. On the other, it indexes an
informal, playful tone. By using these contextualisation cues, T is constructing a
close relationship with his students right in this moment of error correcting, or in
politeness theory’s terms, he is using a positive politeness strategy. It should also
be noted here that a positive politeness strategy by the speaker might misfire if
the hearers do not share the speaker’s frame of a close relationship, in which case
the speaker might be seen as rude and unacceptable. Here in this interaction the
students laugh together (lines 19 and 21), thus co-constructing (Jacoby & Ochs,
Rapport Building in Language Instruction 295

1995) the close relationship that the teacher is bringing to the foreground at this
point – a moment of rapport building has been created. It is important to note
that this rapport with the whole class is built during a correction move with one
student. It occurs during and for instruction.
Immediately after this, C accepts T’s request to stop (line 22). T now directly
points out C’s mistake. In line 23, he refers to the focused structure of the lesson:
‘I want passive voice,’ and in line 25, he refers to C’s specific word use which does
not fit the structure of the passive voice: ‘But I hear creating and presenting’. By
signalling the presence of a problem without providing the correction right
away, T effectively gives C the opportunity to self-correct. This can redress C’s
positive face, and thus mitigate T’s face-threatening act. At the same time, T can
also draw the interest of the other students to the dialogue between him and
C, providing them with a learning opportunity even when they are not directly
addressed. Further, T uses a fine combination of verbal and non-verbal cues in
his correction in line 25. The verbs themselves, ‘creating’ and ‘presenting’, both
end with -ing, a suffix containing the high, front vowel [I]. T exaggerates this
vowel into a tense vowel [i] that involves the spreading of the lips (Avery &
Ehrlich, 1992). This lip spreading is then metamorphosed by T from an audible
stress indicating C’s mistake to a silent expression of half-smile, half-disgust,
which again, has some comic effect and works towards a positive politeness
strategy. Instruction and rapport are being done simultaneously in one syllable
with both a single student and the whole class. After a long pause, C produces
the right form, to which T says ‘thank you’, explicitly marking his acceptance of
her answer.
Thus, while T has to do an inherently face-threatening speech act, namely
correcting a student in front of her peers, he utilises multiple resources not only
to soften the imposition of the act to the student who makes the mistake, but
also to engage the interest of the rest of the class.

The summarisation sequence

In excerpt 6, T makes closing remarks to sum up the exercise on when to use
the passive voice.
Excerpt 6
1 T: ↑ <REMEMBER THIS, (0.5) WHEN YOU’RE WRITING
↑↓PAPERS, (1.0) DON’T USE WE: (1.0) DON’T SAY PEOPLE
MUST DO THIS, PEOPLE MUST DO THAT, (.) SAY THIS
MUST BE DONE, THAT MUST BE DONE,>
2 (0.8)
3 T: <It’s ↑↓better style,>
4 (0.9)
5 T: <Impress your professor,>
6 (1.0)
7 T: <Get [↑↓higher grades,>
8 [raises eyebrows, smiles
9 Ss: [smiles
From lines 1 to 3, T employs interactional resources that contextualise his
turn as typical of teacher’s talk in front of the whole class: loud volume, bare
 296 Language and Education

commands with reference to the content of the lesson. Beginning from line
5, T also orients to the interpersonal, affective aspect with a verb that carries
some emotional and attitudinal connotation, ‘impress’. After a one second
pause with no response yet from the students in line 6, T introduces even more
affective elements in his talk. He uses a facial expression (eyebrow raising
and smiling) that is often associated with playfulness. The phrase ‘get higher
grades’ is quite practical and personalised compared to the purely academic and
non-personalised advice given in line 1. Teachers in general encourage students
to perform better, not just to get better grades. Students among themselves, on
the other hand, might put more emphasis on grades. The mentioning of higher
grades by T at this point thus indexes a shift in footing: the teacher is taking on
the student’s perspective. However, he still has the role of the teacher, which is
why this footing switch is an act that may be seen as a move towards humour.
This playfulness is recognised and responded to by several students, which is
evident in their smiling (line 9).
The summing up of materials is an important step in a language lesson because
more
about it is here that the teacher can make the content of the lesson have some positive
the effects in the students’ use of the language outside of class. In making effective
wrap- summarising points, the teacher needs not only to recapture the content of the
up lesson, but also to relate the lesson materials to the students’ real-life concerns.
As such, it involves the teacher making authoritative statements (which could
potentially create distance), yet at the same time, the teacher may want to create
solidarity with the students. The teacher in this data shows that through the
dynamic use of various interactional resources, it is possible to effectively con-
vey the instructional content and simultaneously strengthen rapport with the
students.

The co-construction of rapport

Rapport is mutual and thus has to be shared and sustained by the efforts
of both parties in a relationship. Rapport building is successful when there
are active reciprocal actions to initiate and maintain it. The above examples
already show that the students responded positively to the teacher (e.g. smiling,
laughing, self-correcting, and paying attention). The example below highlights
the co-participation of the students in rapport building. This sequence of talk
began when a student working in a group asked T what ‘fibre’ meant in the text.
T ventured to give a few definitions of ‘fibre’, but then admitted that he did not
know much about this subject. Excerpt 7 presents the end of this sequence.

Excerpt 7
1 T: ↑↓I don’t- [(2.0)
[shrugs, extends arms outward, makes faces
2 T: [0 just about0 Science.
[hand waves downwards, makes faces again, smiles
3 (0.7)
4 A: No offence.
5 smiles, raises then drops hand
6 (0.2)
7 T: No offense, no offense.
Rapport Building in Language Instruction 297

8 smiles, extends hand towards A

9 A: Oka hhhhh y [heh heh.
10 T: [heh heh but for me:, heh.
raises arms in surrender,
walks to another group
Before line 1, T’s talk is related to the immediate task of answering some
students’ question. In line 1, however, T steps away from the whole issue of
‘fibre’, acknowledging that he does not know much about it, and retreating by
jocularly downplaying science, ‘I don’t- just about Science’ and several rejecting
gestures with his face and arms. The contextualisation cues seem to signal that
T’s instructional task has been completed, and he is temporarily discontinuing
his expert role. Precisely at this point, after a pause, Andy (A), who is probably
majored in science, initiates a playful comment (line 4), indicating that he does
not take offense from T’s humorous trivialising of science. It is T’s relaxing of
his authoritative and expert role in the previous turn that creates this place for A
to become part of this casual, peer-like participation framework. T then repeats
A’s playful comment twice, with a hand gesture that seems to convey respect, a
sign that he ratifies A’s joke (lines 7–8). They both share a laugh before T walks
to the next group. From talk that started out as being strictly task-oriented with
the participants orienting to the sequence of student’s questioning – teacher’s
answering, a moment of co-constructed rapport has clearly emerged.
It should be noted that in line 4, A makes a mistake with the word’s stress
pattern (‘offence’). The silence after A’s turn (line 6) could be evidence of T’s
confusion due to A’s incorrect stress. However, as the interaction goes on, we
see that T does not orient to the incorrectness of A’s utterance. Even though
he repeats the phrase ‘no offence’ twice, neither T nor A seems to treat it as a
correction. A correction may involve T emphasising and focusing more on the
stress pattern of the word ‘offence’ (such as giving exaggerated stress or repeat-
ing only the word containing the error, ‘offence’, and not the whole phrase, ‘no
offence’). Further, the fact that T repeats A’s utterance with a smile and an ac-
companying hand gesture carrying interpersonal meanings indicates that at this
moment the social dimension of the talk was more relevant to the participants
than the formal, linguistic dimension. It is reasonable that T chooses to orient
to the playful, social aspect of A’s turn in line 4 rather than to its language form
because A is displaying orientation to the affective aspect at the moment (he
smiles in line 4 and later laughs out loud in line 7).8 Thus, I surmise that T’s
choice to go with A’s projected participation framework rather than the instruc-
tional task of correction shows that his bypassing the structural mistake in A’s
talk is purposeful, the purpose being the co-construction of rapport with A.
This example not only demonstrates that T manages the conversation with his
students in a way that fosters rapport building, but also reflects the history of
interaction between T and the students, in which a positive, friendly relationship
has been mutually created and maintained.

Conclusion
The analysis above suggests that in a language classroom, the teacher
can employ multiple interactional resources to orient simultaneously to the
 298 Language and Education

instructional task at hand, and to the interpersonal, affective dimension of so-

cial interaction in the classroom. In the examples cited here, the teacher used
resource a wide range of verbal and non-verbal contextualisation cues, including lexi-
s to
build cal items, special grammatical structures, formulaic expressions, speech tempo,
rapport speech volume, emphasis, intonation, facial expressions, body language and
vocal effects. More meaningfully, these cues were used in the sequential organ-
isation of interaction for specific purposes. As demonstrated in the analysis,
they were employed at moments when the students’ or teacher’s face was at
issue, including attention calling, correcting and summarising. Thus, the social,
interpersonal dimension of the talk had the effect of facilitating the immediate
instructional tasks, and the blending of interactional resources was strategically
controlled by the teacher in order to do instruction in such a way that a positive
environment and solidarity in the classroom were also sustained. The outcome
of this is a co-constructed friendly, productive classroom atmosphere in which
the teacher and students effectively carried out their tasks while building a pos-
itive relationship, or in Allwright’s (1989) terms, they were able to accomplish
‘pedagogic possibilities’ while solving ‘social problems’.
These observations about the relationship between rapport and instruction
in this study refocus our attention to the fact that lessons do not exist indepen-
dently of social relationships between the teacher and students. The usual model
of a lesson plan put forward in the literature on language teaching and learning
often has, prior to the lesson ‘proper’, a ‘warm-up’ activity at the beginning (e.g.
Doff, 1988; Kartner, 2003; Scott et al., 2004), when teachers are encouraged to chat
with students and make them feel relaxed and comfortable. The current study
shows that the construction of social relationships permeates every single mo-
ment of teaching and learning, and participants in the classroom constantly and
actively orient to these relationships. As teachers and students work together to
accomplish their institutional goals, they can utilise any interactional resources
suited for this goal (Seedhouse, 1996).
More significantly, from a language learning perspective, moments of rapport
building in instruction provide valuable opportunities for the learners’ partic-
ipation in the target language. In the examples analysed above, the students
could both observe and use verbal and non-verbal resources in contextualised
negotiations of meaning with the teacher. If classroom interaction is a crucial
site for language learning as research has shown (e.g. Breen, 2001a, 2001b; Ellis,
1999; Hajer, 2000; Hall & Verplaetse, 2000; van Lier, 2001), the teacher’s effort
to enrich the social practices of the classroom can increase the ‘dimensions of
discourse’ in the classroom, thus providing more opportunities for language ac-
quisition in context (Breen, 2001a). This study suggests that in addition to other
types of teacher – student interaction such as using wordplay (Sullivan, 2000),
offering and accepting student topicalisations (Ellis, 1999), and creating chances
for students to frame the classroom proceedings (Ellis, 1999), language learning
in the classroom may also be facilitated by the blending of rapport-building in-
teraction in instructions. While the concrete gains of language learning outcome
in this type of interaction needs to be further investigated, the kind of teacher –
student interaction such as in excerpt 7 (in which there was active language use
by the learner) suggests that this is a very likely possibility.
 Rapport Building in Language Instruction 299

perception This study has several practical implications for teaching and teacher train-
of the ing. First and foremost, it promotes the view of the classroom as culture (Breen,
classroom 2001b) in which teachers and learners co-construct interpersonal relationships
while getting their tasks done. The language classroom is the place where people
come together not only to talk about language (e.g. passive voice and prepositions
as in the class observed), but also to use language to create and maintain their
own social environment. Taking this approach, examination of specific class-
room interactions following the analytical model presented here can help novice
teachers develop a concrete understanding about how rapport with students can
be achieved in teaching. Teachers can reflect on their own teaching along the
lines laid out in the above analysis, and find ways to enhance their teaching.
Specifically, humour can be brought in strategically to soften the teacher’s im-
posing acts, to liven up the otherwise monotonous IRF-sequenced lesson, and
to engage other students during a lock-step interaction with one student. Most
importantly, this study suggests that relationship building should be implicitly
blended into instruction throughout the class hour rather than being formulated
as separate sequences. Social talk does not have to be a set-up activity apart from
the content of a lesson; it can be blended into the interaction between teachers
and students. To have ‘authentic’, ‘natural’ ordinary conversations in the ESOL
classroom is an unrealistic goal, because the classroom will always be bound by
its institutional parameters (Seedhouse, 1996). What is realistic and possible is a
type of interaction such as what was observed in this grammar class, where real
learning tasks are done and real social relationships are built through the authen-
tic and natural employment of various interactional resources.9 The teaching of
language does not always have to be only direct and explicit instruction. The
building of rapport does not always have to be outside the lesson. Instruction
and rapport can, and should be, done together in classroom interaction.
This paper raises several important questions for future research. First, the
classroom examined here is located in the United States, where a friendly rela-
tionship between teachers and students is generally viewed as positive. What
happens in other cultures where a hierarchical, asymmetric teacher – student
relationship is the norm? Do teachers utilise the same type of interactional re-
sources as the teacher here to build rapport with students? How do teachers
build different kinds of relationships with their students in instruction? Further,
what happens when the teacher and students do not share the same norm about
teacher – student relationship? How do they negotiate this in interaction? And
finally, with this new understanding of how rapport can be achieved in one
class, how do we study it on a broader scale, e.g. across different teachers, or
with the same teacher but with different groups of students? Eventually, we
may also want to find out how rapport construction in the classroom relate to
students’ language learning processes and outcomes.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the participants who have generously allowed me to video-
tape their class. Cecilia Ford, Richard Young, Guy Kellogg and two anonymous
reviewers gave valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am, how-
ever, responsible for any errors that remain.
300 Language and Education

Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Hanh thi Nguyen, TESL Pro-
grams, Hawaii Pacific University, 1188 Fort Street Mall, Room 441, Honolulu,
HI 96816, USA (htnguyen@hawaii.edu).

Notes
1. For a more detailed understanding of the power relationship between teachers and
students in classroom discourse, see Talty (1995) and Manke (1997).
2. This is based on the definition from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English
Language (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).
3. This is based on ethnographic observations within a period of four years.
4. This is an exercise on pages 85–6 in ‘Compact Mosaic I: A Communication-based
Grammar’, by Patricia K. Werner (1993).
5. The class number and all the names mentioned in this paper are pseudonyms.
6. The fact that T takes a turn right after S’s answer, and that S withholds turn taking
after having given the answer shows that both T and S orient to the structure of the
IRF sequence.
7. It should be noted that T has already produced the corrected form ‘created’ (line
11). However, C’s mistake shows that she did not orient to this form, and thus T’s
backtracking to focus on this form serves the function of error identification, leading
to error correction.
8. Similarly, Hauser (2005) convincingly demonstrates that many instances of NS-NNS
interaction which can be coded as corrective recasts on the surface in fact function
very differently once the sequential organisation of the talk is taken into considera-
tion; and vice versa, there are instances in which the participants engage in language
correction but the talk itself may not contain the surface structure of a corrective
recast.
9. Along the same lines, Markee (2005) suggests that even ‘off-task’ exchanges among
students in group work may be beneficial as opportunities for meaning-focused
language learning.

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Appendix
Transcribing notation
. falling intonation
? rising intonation
, slightly rising intonation
↑ rising pitch in the next phrase
↓ falling pitch in the next phrase
↑↓ pitch rises and falls within the next word
: lengthened speech
= latching speech
- cut off word
underlined stressed syllable
CAPITALISED higher volume
superscript zero0 beginning and end of softer speech
in italics non-verbal actions accompanying speech
(( )) vocal effect accompanying speech
[ beginning of overlap of speech, or speech and
non-verbal action
>< sped up speech
<> slowed down speech
(number) duration of silence in seconds

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