Why Establishing Rapport is Important for You and Your Students

Ever have someone try to establish rapport with you? When we think about it carefully, the answer is affirmative. You need to build rapport with people to make friends. To do business with establishing rapport, as well as sales. Establishing rapport makes things much easier than you don’t. Imagine meeting someone for the first time and you are not interested in him. What is your next move？Obviously you will end the conversation with him? Let us focus on the importance of building rapport in class.

This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Jiajia Z. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.

Teaching success

In my point of view, the good relationship between the learners and the teachers is vital to the success of teaching. If you want to make the class interesting, enjoyable, and effectively helpful to the variety of students, you should establish rapport with the student from the very beginning. The initial connection is more crucial to the entire teaching process. Although building rapport seems like a nice thing to do, I think it is very difficult to do it naturally. It will always make you look like a phony if you are not good at it or do it inappropriately. Therefore, teachers need to think about how and when to build up a good connection with the students after careful consideration.

Also read: 7 Misconceptions about TEFL Uncovered

Building rapport early

Furthermore, I learned from the video lesson of the TEFL lesson that teachers should always bear in mind that to build rapport while at the first beginning of the teaching process. You should smile all the time even if the students are late. It will help students not get nervous to take part in the lesson when you want to elicit them as much as possible. Also building a good relationship can inspire the students and set a relaxed atmosphere. The students are willing to share information with the teachers and students while the atmosphere is relaxing, then it can reduce teacher talk time, increase students' talk time dramatically, the students get more exposure to English and the opportunity to practice. As well as reducing the discipline problems in class, maintaining the class discipline. Thus, the learners can apply the language as much as they can to make the learning more effective and interesting.

Also read: 7 Activities for Teaching the Present Perfect for the ESL Classroom

Pros and Cons

Nevertheless, just as every coin has two sides, cars have both advantages and disadvantages. Some people think that establishing rapport is not so important. What they should do is just to be a good teacher with an amusing personality, using a lot of skills to manage the class i.e. eye contact, gesture, variety range voice, and group the students. Focusing on the ESA methodology also can make the course effective. There are a lot of methods to inspire the student to take part in the class and manage the class. Teachers who have these teaching skills don't think it is necessary to build good relationships with the students. They ignore that a positive attitude and the initial connection is very important especially when you meet the students for the first time, it can cost you a lot of energy on remedying this problem.

However, as everyone knows, people tend to communicate with the people who are interesting and familiar with it. That is what we called “ice-breaking” which is a very important step of the initial connection. If you fail at the ice-breaking part, no matter what you do next will let your mountain in labor bring forth a mouse. The teaching skills and methodology will not make up for ice-breaking failure. If the students are not interested in your lesson, what consequence will be?

The key point of establishing a rapport of my opinion is not about whether or not to build a good relationship with the students in class，it is about the outcome. The better relationship you build，the more willing the students participate in class, the more active the more classroom atmosphere is and the more effective the learning will be. Both the teachers and the students will get what they want, which is the most effective and engaging learning experience. Last but not least, successful icebreaking and initial connection could make the class much more effective and the teaching process smoothly.

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In conclusion, my point of view is that establishing rapport is very important for teaching, as well as business, making friends, consulting, or anything you need to meet and get along with.

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