A Study Of Teacher Immediacy On Junior High School Students With Learning Difficulties In English

Immediacy is initially proposed by Mehrabian,a famous social psychologist.After doing a great amount of work to study immediacy among people in daily life,he summarizes the expressions of immediacy through interpersonal communication.After that,immediacy in teaching area starts to be taken into study.Teacher immediacy has a relatively long history both at home and abroad.It consists of verbal immediacy and nonverbal immediacy,in which the latter is firstly studied.There are many researches about teacher verbal or nonverbal immediacy and most of them focus on the study of teacher immediacy on many variables in the learning environment.Maslow's and Rogers'humanistic teaching theories all emphasize the importance of a harmonious teacher-student relationship in successful teaching and learning.Only by satisfying students' need of love and belonging and giving them the feeling of genuineness and trust can the relationship be established.Teacher immediacy can help build harmonious teacher-student relationship by narrowing the distance between the two and promote students' learning as well as facilitate teachers' teaching.Finally,the teaching and learning efficiency can be correspondingly improved.Students with learning difficulties in English have always been a tough nut for teachers to crack.Most English teachers take a "cooling off" attitude towards them.Some teachers even remain indifferent to them and leave them aside.All those behaviors do great harm to the healthy and whole-round development of those students.Benjamin S.Bloom states in his Mastery Learning Theory that if appropriate learning condition is provided,most students will become very similar in learning.The core objective of the New Curriculum Reform is to focus on the development of every student.To realize this objective,great attention should be paid to students with learning difficulties in English.The teacher should also provide appropriate learning environment for them to inspire their potential.Although a lot of researches about students with learning difficulties have been conducted,relatively few researches at home and abroad have specifically looked into the effect of teacher immediacy on students with learning difficulties in English at junior high school level.Therefore,in this thesis,both verbal and nonverbal immediate behaviors are adopted by the author to approach students with learning difficulties on purpose so as to examine the effect of teacher immediacy on them.This would be achieved via answering three questions:1)What are the major problems of students with learning difficulties in English?2)What is the relationship between teacher immediacy and the learning of students with learning difficulties in English?3)How does teacher immediacy influence the learning of students with learning difficulties in English?98 students and 8 teachers in the 7th grade in Xin Feng Junior High School in Dong Guan are involved in the study.The 98 students are in two same-level classes,of whom 50 are in the experiment class and the other 48 in the control class.The author employs teacher immediacy behaviors in the experiment class while in the control class traditional teaching is adopted.The experiment lasts for one term.The author utilizes two sets of questionnaires,a pre-test and a post-test,interviews and observation as instruments to collect data.Then the data are analyzed by the author with the help of SPSS 19.0.The study has the following findings:1)Students with learning difficulties in English have negative attitudes in learning English.Their intensity of motivation in English learning remains to be improved.Almost all of them are excessively anxious in the process of learning English.In addition,they also worry about the unsatisfactory relationship with the English teacher.2)Teacher immediacy and the learning of students with learning difficulties in English including affective learning as well as cognitive learning are in positive relation.3)Teacher immediacy affects the learning of those students by changing their attitude,strengthening their intensity of motivation and decreasing their anxiety in English learning.Building harmonious teacher-student relationship also accounts.Finally,the author points out the limitations in this thesis and recommends some suggestions for further study.The thesis is divided into six parts.The first chapter is the introduction,explaining the background,the significance and the structure of the thesis.The second chapter is the literature review,including the definition and classification of immediacy,related studies of teacher immediacy at home and abroad and the influence of teacher immediacy on learning.Besides,relevant knowledge of students with learning difficulties in English is also displayed in this chapter.Chapter three introduces the theoretical framework.Methodology of the study is presented in chapter four and a sample lesson of teacher immediacy in English classroom is also demonstrated here.Chapter five is the results and discussion.Chapter six is the conclusion of the thesis.The author describes the major finding and limitations of the thesis.Recommendations are also provided.