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Establishing rapport with your students is the first step into creating a healthy teaching relationship with your students. You want to create this relationship for a number of reasons, but the ones I will be discussing today are the most important in my opinion. The first and foremost is inspiring your students to actively participate in the classroom verbally. The second and subtler change that you aspire to create is a sense of responsibility that is created through the learning process, which begins with rapport. What you say to your students and how you relate to them is crucial if you are to foster a healthy and nurturing learning environment, and in some cases establish a foundation for the students and their future teachers to build upon. I have yet to experience the first day of class teaching students who are learning English, so I am ignorant of how the teacher feels trying to capture a group of students’ attention. However from a student’s perspective it seems incredibly daunting, and exciting at the same time. From day one you try to establish rapport, and not all of it sticks, for any number of reasons. Whether a student is having a bad day and doesn’t feel like talking as much, or a shy student who has trouble expressing themselves verbally, it is the teachers job to initiate. In the teaching experience I plan for myself it will be a situation where I interact with a group of strangers that I may never see again, so creating an environment where students feel comfortable enough to open up is important. To inspire participation you need to find common ground with your students. Find something that everyone can relate to, like breakfast foods, or maybe sports, and explore the different vocabulary associated for an engage section of the lesson plan. It is easiest to establish rapport during the engage portion because there is less formality and room to be silly. You probably wont want to distract the students during the study portion of the class, but during the engage section you can create a task where the students can read, or write, or talk about something they have a passion for, giving you more insight into what they would like to learn about. Finding common ground is a huge step towards eliciting the kind of participation you want from your students. After you find common ground and have begun the process of learning your students’ names, you begin to see a relationship start to form. It is slow at first, but you will progress each day nurturing and cultivating your garden of learners. Your lesson plans, which are aimed at helping your students not only learn about the language but enjoy doing it, and your students seeing your efforts and wanting to succeed not only for themselves but also to impress their fellow classmates and their teacher with their progress. This cyclical feeding off of each other’s positive attitudes all began with the teachers desire for their students to succeed, and how better to pass along these feeling than through verbal rapport. Although rapport can never be one sided, it can often seem that way at the beginning. Since it is the teacher’s job to initiate and establish, the delivery in which one does so is crucial. Showing energy and passion about the language and your students will promote these same emotions in the students that they can carry not only for the duration of your course, but for the rest of their lives.
