Analyzing Advising Sessions for Rapport-Building Discursive Elements

This study investigates the bond between the learning advisors and advisees that is presumed to be established by building rapport in the very first advising session through the use of intentional reflective dialogues. Applying basic advising strategies with the assistance of a structured dialogue eases the process of building rapport between the learning advisors and learners. Investigating this bond in terms of discursive functions of the talk between the advisors and advisees during advising sessions gives the opportunity to explore the concept of building rapport from a linguistic perspective. With respect to methodology, a corpus-based discourse analysis was adopted, and the analysis was performed on the recorded and transcribed talks of eight participants in four different advising sessions. The results of the study confirmed that rapport between the advisors and advisees can be built even in the very first advising session employing various rapport-building discourse functions. The results also provide insight and useful feedback to the learning advisors in the field as well as being input for the advising discourse.