The Relationship Between Teacher-Student Rapport and EFL Learners' Engagement in Online Scaffolding Setting

Given the breakout of the Covide-19 pandemic, online L2 learning has become more popular than ever so traditional in-person classroom instruction is giving way to virtual learning. The different approaches to virtual L2 learning entail learners' serious engagement to create their own learning pace. Instructors have a lasting effect on the students when they decide on how, where, and how well learners figure out and how they engage in interactions with each other. Engagement is concerned with rapport, which can be reinforced through scaffolding. Fostering rapport is claimed to improve engagement, degree of satisfaction, and collaboration, leading to effective engagement in the learning process. However, on the one hand, the relation between the two variables has not been examined in language learning, and on the other hand, they have not been investigated in an online scaffolding setting. In order to consider the issue, 586 EFL participants from universities in China were asked to take part in the study and they should answer two questionnaires, namely the student engagement instrument, and the teacher-student rapport scale. In so doing, 494 respondents were kept for the main analysis. The correlation between the two constructs through structural equation modeling (SEM) was 0.714, which is considered a significant and strong correlation. In a nutshell, some academic recommendations for educational stakeholders are provided.