Constructing positive interaction in the EFL classroom: Positive discourse analysis study

Abstract

Positive interaction is one of the important factors that support students’ engagement and development in the classroom. The previous study focused on the use of positive language to promote the teachers’ ideas without deeply discussing how that language can contribute toward engagment dynamic of lecturers and students. This study examines how English lecturers use language that contributes to positive interaction in their classroom during the teaching and learning process. The researchers adopted a qualitative approach with a case study design. Data were collected through audio recordings of six English lecturers at a private university in Malang. Data analysis was conducted using the positive discourse analysis framework, focusing on coding based on communication strategies used and categorizing related to positive discourse. The analysis shows that lecturers contribute to using positive discourse and validate student contributions, provide effective scaffolding and mitigate criticism, empower through collaboration and inclusivity, enforce rules with politeness and contextual flexibility, and demonstrate contextual awareness. This finding can be a source for English lecturers and teachers to design a more supportive and polite approach used in everyday life. This research has some limitations, such as the number of participants and audio recording data, which do not capture face mimic, gestures, and body language that support building positive interactions. This limitation becomes a consideration to understand that these findings are contextual based which cannot be generalized. For further research, it is recommended to expand the scope of participants, cultural contexts, and multimodal data to capture the nonverbal dimension of positive discourse.