The Effective And Appropriate Application Of Kinesies In English Classroom Teaching In China

As a new and exciting science, the study of nonverbal behavior has been uncovered and explored within the last 40 years although nonverbal communication even has a longer history than both oral and written communication. For a long time, people in our daily life normally emphasize the verbal aspect of communication, overlooking the fact that the majority of the information in face-to-face communication conveyed by the people is nonverbal. As nonverbal communication is so basic that we tend to take it for granted and always ignore it in our English classroom teaching. However, nonverbal communication, especially kinesics, has powerful influence on English classroom teaching, and the kinesic skills are invaluable for teachers in getting the messages across to class and understanding the messages of interest or messages of confrontations.Kinesics, with a variety of definitions, has developed into a new discipline. It covers a wide range of scope that is classified in different ways by different theorists. This paper prefers such a kind of classification as the use of facial expressions, eye contact, posture, gesture, touch, physical attractiveness and artifacts. Kinesics characterizes a lot and functions a great deal, and it has its own types and functions in classroom teaching.Different cultures have different attitudes toward kinesics. People's employment of kinesics is subconscious, learned and culture-bound. A proper behavior in one culture might be a faux pas in another. For example, in Chinese culture, teachers are accustomed to controlling their emotions or even hiding their true feelings and emotions. On the contrary, western teachers always regard the classroom as a performance stage and they themselves act like actors to create a relaxed atmosphere for learning and teaching; in Chinese classroom, when a question is raised in class, the students customarily lower their heads and keep silence, which is considered as a kind of modest. While Westerners are most influenced by their tradition, they treasure verbal skills greatly. The differences between Chinese culture and Western culture in the use of kinesics in classroom...