An Investigation Of Non-English Major Student's Nonverbal Communicative Competence

Language is the means of transmitting culture; it is a portion of culture as well. The certain language usually springs from the certain cultural background. Thus, the process of learning a foreign language is also the process of learning the culture from which the language originated. There are two forms in human communication:verbal communication and nonverbal communication, both of which have played a supporting role in the process of communication. Nonverbal communication refers to all the communicative behaviors beyond language. Mark Knapp provide the definition of nonverbal communication in the year of 1980 as The term nonverbal communication refers to nonverbal behavior that people perform with the value of message, and the signals to which meaning will be attributed.The scientific study of nonverbal communication primarily started after World Warâ…¡. It was until 1950s that it experienced a breakthrough development. Hu Wenzhong has introduced the fruit of foreign researches into our country and proposed his own perspectives on it. Lately, more and more educational experts and foreign language teachers offered their opinions on FLT. New perspectives, measures and proposals came into being one after another. In our country, He Ziran used to analyze several cases of the errors in intercultural communication and language utilization caused by cultural factors. As to practical research, Wang Zhenya, Zhong Hua, Fan Weiwei, Qin Aosong had done some researches on English major students and non-English major students respectively. The similarity their researches shared was that they all proved the existence of minor relationship between students'language competence and cultural competence, and the students'cultural competence have not been fully developed.Therefore, this research was based on Ting-Toomy's classification of nonverbal communication. The author combined the two research methods of documentary analysis and empirical study together and proved the following two questions:1) High level English language competence does not definitely guarantee high level intercultural nonverbal communicative competence; 2) college English classes fail to take the role of the best channel of cultivating the students'intercultural nonverbal communicative competence.200 second-year non-English major students were chosen randomly from Xi'an Technological University as the participants of the empirical study. Questionnaire functioned as the major implement in this research. A cultural test was included in the questionnaire and the result of the test was conducted by software SPSS (11.50). The paper aims to get to know the non-English majors'intercultural nonverbal communication competence and the college English teachers'awareness of it through questionnaires and data analysis. Thus offer some implications for college English teaching.