Effects Of Nonverbal Codes Produced By Native English Teachers In ESL Classroom

The development of ESL teaching in China opened more and more opportunities for the Native English teachers to teach in China. Each day these English teachers will face thousands of Chinese students in the ESL classes all over China. Their contributions towards China English teaching become a non-neglected part. And millions of students get their English improved with the help of these native English teachers. For over 10 years, the doctorial English program of Jilin University has been under the assistance of these native English teachers. The problem is while these native English teachers are working on the students' English in the classroom, they must be pouring their body language out, and radiating their non-verbal codes into the learners. While in such a cross-cultural classroom setting, the question is to what degree the native English teachers serve the functions of their nonverbal behaviors; and how much pressure students can feel the barriers of nonverbal communication.In order to study these questions, the researcher followed the doctorial ESL program of Jilin University from the September of 2002 to the June of 2003. The study was conducted among 5 English classes of 150 students and five native English teachers. Two questionnaires, an initiate and a closed one were provided for evaluating the developmental changes; 15 weeks' classroom observations were followed for obtaining the first hand information, and the spot person-to-person interviews were conducted with the teachers and the students to clear the misunderstandings and grasp the opinions and thoughts from the subjects. Historical studies past and present: The scientific study of nonverbal communication initially started after World War Ⅱfrom 1940s, since then there has been a significant increase in the number of nonverbal researches. Four of the most worthy mentioned works in the field of study are Birdwhistell's Introduction to Kinesics published in 1952; Hall's two books Silent Language and The Hidden Dimension respectively published in 1959 and 1966; and Julius Fast's book Body Language in 1970. Among them, Hall's Silent Language and The Hidden Dimension opened up the field study of the nonverbal communication in a more comprehensive cross- cultural way The researches on nonverbal behavior in China began from 1980s. In 1988, Geng Erling published the first monographs on nonverbal communication《体态语概说》, to the year 1999, Bi Jiwan's book 《跨文化非语言交际》was published. Up to now, the most abundant study in the field indicates the differences between Chinese and English was done by L? Brosnahan in his manuscript Chinese and English Gesture: Contrastive Nonverbal Communication. In his book, Brosnahan discussed the effectiveness brought into nonverbal communication codes from the Western and the Eastern value systems  apartness (collectivism) and togetherness (individualism), this perspective opened a new vision for the following studies. There is no shortage of definitions and classifications for nonverbal communication. For this study, the researcher adopted the definition of the nonverbal communication as "all the factors affecting human communication except vocal language". As for the research happened in the ESL classroom setting, the fast flash of a certain nonverbal communication code and the flow natures of each scene made the observation difficult to identify, the researcher classified the nonverbal communication codes into the following eight categories, they are kinesics, proxemics, spatial arrangement, physical characters, artifacts, chronemics, environmental factors and paralanguage. Considering the classroom context, Cooper mentioned that nonverbal communication played a significant role in several areas. These included self-presentation, identification of rules and expectations, feedback and reinforcement, liking and attitude, regulation of conversational flow, and classroom control. A most well-done study reported by Rosenthal and Jacobson in their article Pygmalion in the Class...