An Empirical Study Of Teacher Paralanguage In Business English Classes

Paralanguage conveys vast effective communication cues,but empirical studies of paralanguage use in classes are rare.Literature demonstrates a typical research approach of subjective description and/or illustration through examples,lacking empirical supporting evidence.This study aims at identifying paralanguage use in business English classes with empirical evidence,and attempts to examine the correlations between teacher paralanguage and ranking level,expecting to shed light on effective teaching in business English classes.Ten videotapes of the Sixth National Contest on Business English Teaching were adopted as data.Paralanguage use is analyzed through annotation based on ELAN and correlation analysis based on SPSS.The annotation result shows that pause,stress,and articulation rate are the main aspects of paralanguage use by the subject teachers.Frequent tag use has also been observed which impedes effective teaching to some extent.The computed correlation analysis shows that there exists a highly significant difference in each aspect of teacher paralanguage among the ranking levels,except the stress with a slightly significant difference.It is expected that the study would provide a number of implications for effective business English teaching.