Nikan Fujii
Kyoto Notre Dame University
About
Nikan Fujii (formerly Nikan Sadehvandi) is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Kyoto Notre Dame University. She teaches English language courses, including communication, writing, and hospitality. Her research interests lie at the intersection of educational technology and language education. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from the Graduate School of Education at Kyoto University, where she was actively involved in developing several massive open online courses (MOOCs), focusing on designing interventions to improve the quality of peer assessment. Her current research explores the integration of technology and AI in English education to enhance learner engagement, motivation, and autonomy.Sessions
Presentation An Interactional Study of Student-Student Rapport Construction in a Zoom Course on EFL Small Talk more
Rapport plays a central role in fostering engagement, participation, and interpersonal alignment in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) interaction, yet student-student rapport in online settings remains underexplored. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) Rapport Management Model (RMM), this study investigates how Japanese university EFL learners construct rapport during Zoom-based small-talk interactions, with a particular focus on the interactional strategies used across verbal, paralinguistic, and embodied nonverbal domains. Using video-recorded dyadic Zoom interactions, the study adopts a qualitative, micro-analytic approach to capture interactional strategies for rapport development across complete interactional episodes. A stratified purposive sample of dyads was analyzed to explore patterns of rapport construction and potential gender-based differences in interactional practices. The study offers pedagogical insights into how rapport can be systematically analyzed in online EFL interaction. By linking theoretical constructs to observable interactional practices, the findings inform task design, teacher mediation, and the development of interactional competence in digitally mediated language learning contexts.