Teacher immediacy behaviors and participation in computer mediated communication

Abstract

Few concepts in instructional communication literature have received as much attention as teacher immediacy. However, educational communication scholars have thoroughly studied immediacy behaviors mainly in traditional classrooms and these studies are mostly related to student attitudes and learning. Thanks to some growing attempts, recent research has extended these findings to distance education. The difference of this study is to examine the relationship between teacher immediacy behaviors and participation in an online setting. Results indicated that affective and interactive indicators were the least used immediacy behaviors while cohesive indicators were mostly used by teacher in this case. Also data show that teachers' interactive immediacy behaviors and immediate feedback determine students' participation in asynchronous computer-mediated communication environment.