Teachers' Nonverbal Immediacy and GFP Students' Intrinsic Motivation:An Application of Immediacy Theory

Abstract

This is a theoretical paper that evaluates the correlation between the nonverbal immediacy behaviors of the teachers and the intrinsic motivation of students undertaking General Foundation Programs (GFP) in tertiary education using the Immediacy Theory by Mehrabian as the main point of analysis. Nonverbal immediacy operationalized in terms of behaviors including eye contact, gestures, facial expressions, vocal variety, and physical proximity has been repeatedly linked with positive affective learning experiences in a variety of educational settings. This paper will use the Immediacy Theory which suggests that communicative behaviors that lead to minimization of psychological distance create relational closeness and positive affect to explain how behaviors can be used to develop intrinsic motivation in GFP students. The GFP context is a special pedagogical context where students who have left secondary and started their higher education often come across linguistic, academic and psychological demands, making teacher immediacy more consequential. The presented paper is a narrative literature review of both empirical and theoretical articles published in 2000-2024 that have been identified by applying a set of preset inclusion and exclusion criteria via a systematic search of ERIC, Google Scholar, and JSTOR databases. The review incorporates the discoveries in the spheres of communication, educational psychology and second-language acquisition to develop a conceptual framework of how teacher nonverbal immediacy is related to increased intrinsic motivation, and the quality of teacher-student relationships is suggested as a critical mediating variable. The paper ends with conclusions about practical implications to GFP instructors, institutional stakeholders, and the future empirical research directions.