The Student Teachers’ Verbal and Non-Verbal Reinforcement During Teaching Practice in Microteaching Class

Abstract

Reinforcement is teacher’s response toward students’ behavior during teaching and learning process which given as appreciation and motivation to a student who performed desirable behavior such as answer teachers’ question correctly, get the best mark in the class and so forth. A teacher must owned reinforcement skill both verbal and non-verbal as it provides support for students to improve their performance. Reinforcement can be given to individual and group by paying attention on the immediacy and variation. The aims of this research are to know types of verbal and non-verbal reinforcement given by student teachers in microteaching class and to describe the way student teachers give it to their peers who take role as students. A qualitative design with naturalistic approach was employed in this research to gain the data needed. There were 8 student teachers from 8 different microteaching classes who had participated in this research. The data were collected through observation, interview and student teachers’ teaching practice videos. This research revealed that student teachers gave verbal reinforcement in form of word such as good, great, right, and in form of sentence as like ‘I think your suggestion is amazing…’ and so forth. On the other hand, types of non-verbal reinforcement performed by student teachers were gesture, proximity, activity, and token/symbol. In gestural reinforcement, student teachers performed facial expression like smiling and body gesture like finger pointing, clapping hand, and nodding. The student teachers also walked to and stood beside students’ seat as proximity reinforcement. In addition, various activities such as debate activity, presentation, game, and displaying students’ work in front of the class were provided by student teachers to reinforce students. For the token or symbol reinforcement student teachers gave emoticon, love and star to students’ work as evaluation and appreciation. The finding also showed that student teachers gave reinforcement through four ways such as to individual, to group, as soon as students performed desirable behavior and use reinforcement in various types and patterns. To sum up, verbal reinforcement was commonly used during teaching practice as it is easy to use and can be used spontaneously. Besides, non-verbal reinforcements such as token/symbol and activity had significant impact on teaching due to student motivation and active participation during teaching and learning process. Further, it is essential for the student teachers as candidate of teacher to use reinforcement in their teaching and to pay attention on keeping eye contact, mentioning student’s name, and providing reason why student is reinforced while giving reinforcement to student. Thus, the reinforcement will be effective.