When people are
engaged in any interaction, they are likely to respond to each other's verbal
and nonverbal cues. This responsiveness is a critical factor in the notion of rapport.
In this paper, the author argues that the same human dynamics that govern
everyday conversations are at play between participants in institutionalized
conversations such as classroom discourse. The purpose of this study is to
develop critical aspects of "conversational involvement" (Duranti,
1986; Goodwin, 1986; Gumperz, 1982; Tannen, 1985) as rapport-building devices
and to provide observable phenomena that characterize rapport with
participants' verbal and nonverbal cues in informal and formal conversation. In
this study, nine people participated: a Korean professor of an elementary
Korean language class at a major US university and eight undergraduate students
whose first language is English. Three fifty-minute classroom sessions were
videotaped, and segments that illustrated the teacher's and students' behaviors
that facilitated rapport were transcribed and qualitatively analyzed. The
author recorded the frequency of the teacher's verbal and nonverbal cues that
appeared to foster rapport. This study found that the teacher shared small talk
in informal before-class conversations by bringing up insignificant details
about daily life. The teacher played the role of teacher during class by
directing a lesson. However, she continued to utilize various rapport-building
devices through selected verbal and nonverbal cues to engage her students in
the conversation. In this classroom, as in everyday conversation, the
participants demonstrated their desire to listen to, be responsive to, and be
influenced by individuals in a certain way. The participants were part and
parcel of achieving their goals in the classroom. The participants created a
certain alignment to achieve their goals and signal that they were involved in
the interaction. Then, the students would be able to learn the target language
more through the involvement of the classroom activity, which is one of the
outcomes of good rapport.
