Building Teacher-student Relationship for Difficult Students

Abstract

Although there are many studies that discuss how to build teacher-student relationships, studies that only focus on teacher-student relationships for difficult students in the English classroom are still limited. This study aims to investigate how an English teacher built her relationships with the difficult students. This is a qualitative study. The data were collected by using an interview with one of the English teachers at an Islamic boarding school in Yogyakarta and were analyzed by following qualitative data analysis framework from Creswell (2014). . The results of this study showed that the teacher build relationship with her students through these following was: 1) Positive affect, such as showing care with her students, and remembering their students’ names; 2) Positive reciprocity, such as having good coordination between teacher and students; 3) Positive power, such as asking her students about the difficulties of learning English; 4) Negative power, such as leaving the students' scores as they are. In addition to these four findings, this research also has revealed an emergent finding where teachers had good communication and coordination with peer teacher or musyrifah who is a Quran teacher in the dormitory. This research suggests some implications for teachers and school management system to be more aware of their relationship with their students especially difficult students.