Study On Application Of College English Teacher Nonverbal Communication In Classroom Teaching

Human communication can be divided into two categories: verbal communication and nonverbal communication, where verbal means is commonly considered to be the most important, efficient, powerful means of communication. Over decades, much attention has been given to the research on verbal communication, while a very important fact was neglected: in face-to-face communication, the use of nonverbal communication is more common than that of verbal communication, and it is an essential part of human communication, which plays a significant role. Ignorance of nonverbal messages will result in incompleteness.Emerged as a new branch of learning, the study of nonverbal communication has only been started since 1950s. Different theorists have different views on the definition of nonverbal communication. Generally speaking, nonverbal communication refers to the information that is transmitted from senders to receivers when the dominant meaning is not conveyed by the use of words. Another way to put it is that nonverbal communication involves all those nonverbal stimuli in a communication setting that are generated by both the source and his or her use of the environment and that has potential message value for the source or receiver (Samovar&Porter 2000:149). As for the classification of nonverbal communication, there is classification of nonverbal communication by western scholars, and classification of nonverbal communication by Chinese scholars, classification of nonverbal communication in English classroom teaching. As far as the functions are concerned, nonverbal cues operate in a number of ways. It is widely held that nonverbal communication serves six primary functions: repeating, substituting, complementing, reinforcing, contradicting and regulating.In the past two decades, college English teaching has made great achievements. Yet problems still prevail. Daily classroom teaching is still inefficient although a lot of time and money has been spent on. One of the reasons for that is that nonverbal communication is neglected in daily classroom teaching.Teachers'nonverbal communication plays an important role in college English classroom teaching. Many studies find that teachers should learn to use nonverbal communication to improve the quality of classroom teaching. A famous scholar Cooper (1988) holds that if the teacher knows how to use nonverbal communication more efficiently, the relationship between the teacher and students will be improved, and the recognitive ability and learning efficiency of the students will also be developed.Based on the achievements of the modern linguistics, psychology and sociology, this article aims to study systematically on the history,the definition,the classification,the functions of nonverbal communication. Videos for 30 excellent college English teachers whose courses are defined as"Excellent Courses"are downloaded from the internet, and videos of 30 ordinary college English teachers who are selected randomly. In addition to these materials, interviews designed for 35 college students also offer data for the paper. This paper aims at illustrating in details the use of nonverbal communication of college English teacher in terms of body language(including head movements, hand movements, eye contact, smiling, posture,), environment language(time assignment), object language(general appearance and dress), paralanguage(silence) in the process of classroom English teaching, indicating how college English teacher efficiently make full use of nonverbal communication in classroom teaching to arouse students'interest of learning English.The teachers who often smile usually bring out a relaxing atmosphere. In most cases, excellent teachers make eye contact to communicate with the students, making judgments on whether the students are listening to the class attentively and whether they understand the class. Natural expressions and appropriate gestures improve teaching effect. Furthermore, the teacher's voice quality, volume, pitch, intonation and pronunciation all have indispensable influence on teaching.Generally speaking, the appearance and dress of a teacher can positively or negatively influence classroom teaching, while the teacher who walks around appropriately in the process of teaching can bring more positive teaching effect than those who are standing or sitting still during the whole class. The author supposes that, as the disseminator of knowledge, college teachers should not only pay much attention to verbal communication, which is the effective way of transmitting and understanding the message, but also be fully aware of the important functions of their own nonverbal communication. Effectively use of nonverbal communication to regulate the classroom teaching can be expressed as followings: being observant of nonverbal behavior, making full use of nonverbal communication to manage teaching.