Incorporating teacher immediacy into foreign language teacher education

In essence, this research aims to foster the immediacy behaviors of EFL teacher trainees through the incorporation of an immediacy training program into the initial teacher education; and to scrutinize the learning gains, perceptions and self-evaluations of the trainees throughout the immediacy training. The training through which the trainees could discover their own immediacy behaviors includes pre-, while- and post-training phases. The pre-training phase intends to raise awareness on the concept of teacher immediacy and to describe the trainees' current immediacy behaviors before they receive any training on teacher immediacy. Afterwards, the purpose of the while-training phase is to promote the trainees' verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors. Moreover, in the post-training phase, the objective is to examine the sustained learning gains of the trainees as a result of the training. With those aims in mind, this research was designed as an instrumental case study in which the objective was to understand the case of EFL teacher trainees who received the immediacy training throughout one semester (14 weeks). Before the implementation of the immediacy training, a four-week pilot work focused on the improvement of verbal immediacy behaviors was conducted with a group of EFL teacher trainees. As for the pre- and while-training phases of the study, the criterion sampling method was utilized to determine the participants. In these phases, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected through the immediacy measurements, focus group interviews, session evaluation forms and the researcher journal. Following this, for the post-training phase, the maximal variation sampling method was applied based on the frequency of occurrences of the participants' immediacy behaviors in the pre-training phase. The selected participants' sustained learning gains from the immediacy training were unraveled through the reflection reports. Regarding the data analysis, the whole qualitative data were analyzed via NVivo from an inductive perspective except for the data obtained from the researcher journal which were analyzed via manual content analysis. In addition, descriptive statistics was run via SPSS for the analysis of the obtained quantitative data. Throughout all these data collection and analysis processes, starting from the pilot work to the post-training phase, the necessary steps (e.g. expert opinion, member-check, intra- and inter-coder reliability and so on) were taken to ensure the trustworthiness of the study. The core findings suggested that the trainees, before the training, had no familiarity about the concept of teacher immediacy theoretically; and the employed immediacy behaviors of the trainees in practice were considerably infrequent and unvaried. Besides, during the training, the trainees were found to learn the influences of the teacher immediacy behaviors on teaching and learning in general as well as how to combine verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors effectively. Apart from such learning gains, the trainees detected a number of areas which they should improve themselves such as making more practices on teacher immediacy and learning how to be more natural and creative in using immediacy behaviors. In regard to the effectiveness of the training, it was revealed that the trainees perceived the entire training as effective in terms of its content, trainer, resources and objectives. More specifically, they were of the opinion that the training provided them to learn and experience new ways to be immediate and to raise awareness of teacher behaviors. Lastly, in the post-training phase, it was uncovered that the trainees could look at their learning gains from the whole immediacy training from a reflective stance; and most importantly, they gained the belief of becoming an immediate EFL teacher in the future. All things considered, a specific methodology course focusing upon the development of teacher immediacy behaviors should be added into initial teacher education curricula so that the trainees could become more familiar with the communicative dimension of teaching in consequence of their efforts to be more immediate teachers. Keywords: Teacher immediacy, teacher trainees, teacher education