The Effect of Emotive Interaction With a Teacher on Junior High School Students’ EFL Writing
Kyoto Junior College of Foreign Languages, Japan
ABSTRACT
This study is an initiative that aimed to place a teacher-student emotive interaction at the centre of the enhancement of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) proficiency of junior high school students in Japan. Junior high school students at adolescence become too conscious of lack of fluency in second language and hesitate to express themselves. Especially, contrary to the situation in the past, the writing skill of Japanese students has been reported to decrease compared with other skills of English proficiency; speaking, listening, and reading. This study focuses on writing instruction over the long run, one whole year. To be specific, this paper reports on a project in which an EFL teacher in Japan explored ways in order to interact with her students at an emotional level. In order to develop teacher-student communication, the instruction includes: 1) At the beginning of the lesson, the teacher revealed her inner self in her short speech and the students reacted to the speech in writing short comment; 2) The teacher gave a notebook for journal writing to each student with the intention of encouraging them to communicate with the teacher personally. 3) The teacher’s emotive feedback was given to the students with the intention of encouraging the students to interact with the teacher at an emotive level. On the basis of qualitative analysis of journal writing and the questionnaire which the students were given after the one-year instruction, it was revealed that the writing instruction encouraged the students to engage in an emotive interaction with the teacher. Moreover, the results of statistical analysis of Global Test of English Communication for Students (GTEC for Students) proved the enhancement of writing proficiency of the students.
KEYWORDS
Teacher-student interaction, emotion, writing instruction