Designing and Implementing a Teacher Immediacy Course for EFL Teacher Trainees

Abstract

The purpose of this action research was, first, to explore in what ways an elective teacher immediacy course incorporated into a teacher training program promoted EFL teacher trainees’ immediacy behaviours. Based upon the trainees’ background immediacy knowledge, the second purpose was to detect the trainees’ learning gains, perceptions, and self-evaluations throughout the course. To this end, a 14-week course was designed and implemented in a way that the trainees worked on the theories and applications of immediacy. The participants were composed of 61 senior teacher trainees majoring in ELT at a public university in Turkey. The data were triangulated through the concurrent employment of immediacy measurements, focus group interviews, session evaluation forms, and the researcher journal. Descriptive statistics of the quantitative data and inductive content analyses of the qualitative data demonstrate that the course was effective in enhancing and expanding the trainees’ immediacy behaviours, and provided the trainees to gain various theoretical and practical knowledge of immediacy.