You need to make sure that your emulator is not set to use a hardware keyboard. This can be done by choosing Edit on a selected emulator in the AVD. Then uncheck the Hardware keyboard present setting.
You could also try using a different emulator, such as Genymotion. It supports full hardware acceleration (multi-core CPU as well as GPU) and runs much faster than any of the android emulator images. If you use Genymotion you will need to disable the hardware keyboard within Android (see below for details).
To disable hardware keyboard in Genymotion:
Go to Settings -> Language & input and open the Default item under Keyboard & Input Methods. There is a Hardware setting that you can toggle on/off. When it is on you use your physical keyboard and when it is off the standard soft keyboard should pop-up whenever a text field gets focus.
Screenshots for Genymotion settings:
