Teachers’ strategies in building good rapport to reduce students’ english-speaking anxiety

Establishing positive rapport is a crucial thing in classroom language. Rapport building contributes to creating a positive classroom atmosphere that can help the students in the learning process. It can decrease students’ anxiety and improve student participation in the classroom. Rapport building represents teachers' behavior to build good rapport between teacher and students in the classroom. This qualitative research aims to investigate the teachers’ strategy in building rapport and problems faced by the teachers in establishing rapport. This research used classroom observation and interview to obtain the data. It involved two English teachers from regular and intensive classes. The research finding shows that there are different strategies between regular and intensive teachers in building rapport to facilitate students participation in speaking English as foreign language. An English teacher in a regular class implements more strategies than a regular teacher. Furthermore, there are some problems faced by the teachers in building rapport to facilitate students' interaction in the language classroom. The problems are fear of mistakes, shyness, lack of confidence and lack of motivation. So, the teachers should encourage students to speak English as much as they can in the classroom by establishing a good relationship between EFL teacher and student.