Four elementary school teachers'' immediacy and their associated beliefs

• Main Authors: Hsiu-wen Wang, 王秀文
• Other Authors: Chin-cheng Hung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/89176545286873716481

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 教育研究所 === 96 === Most researches are focus on teacher’s verbal immediacy, and few of them on teacher’s nonverbal immediacy and their associated beliefs. This study aims to explore the immediacy and the associated beliefs of four teachers who are closed to their students. Specific research questions are addressed as follows. (a) What are the four teachers’ immediacy behaviors? (b) What are the beliefs about the above teachers’ immediacy behaviors? Data from interviews, related documents and observations are collected for 10 months and analyzed. Findings are organized in the following three axes. First, the four teachers’ verbal immediacy behavior (including oral and worded) and touch with conversations aim to reduce the mental and physical distance between teachers and students. To express their intimacy, the four teachers praise the students concretely; make conversation with student inside and outside of classes. Sometimes they act like a child or make fun of themselves for getting closed to the students. In addition, the four teachers interact with students by giving intensive and positive feedbacks regarding the students’ daily problems shown in their homework of diary; one teacher Yao- Le, even construct his own blog to intensively interact with his students during after school hours . Most of them physically interact with students to express their support and acceptance to students, which is not common in teacher’s culture in Taiwan. Even when the student, John, who comes from low SES, being rejected by his classmates, the teacher Wu , intentionally hugs the student in front of the class to model the expression of caring and friendliness to John and the whole class. Second, the four teachers perceived contexts and gender issues as facilitating or constraining in their immediacy behaviors. Students’ responses to teacher’s immediacy behavior and their characteristics are concerned for teachers’ immediacy behaviors. The teachers hesitate of their immediacy behavior when giving important lessons, which require students’ concentrations or taking a serious role of students’ homeroom teacher. Third, the teachers’ beliefs of immediacy are goal-orientated. They believe that immediacy behavior will encourage students to perform better. The teachers accept that kids’ misbehavior at young age, and they believe that loving student will get good response from the student or their parents. Those teachers also belief that when teachers express caring by physically or verbally getting close to students , students will have trust in teacher and be willing to get close to teacher, thus, teacher will have more chances to understand what are in their minds before educating them.