Nonverbal Communication And College English Teaching

Human communication can be divided into two kinds: verbal and nonverbal. Verbal communication is commonly considered as our most important, efficient, powerful means of communication. By far, much attention has been given to the research on verbal communication. And much stress has been laid on the verbal form of intercultural communication. Because of this we are apt to overlook nonverbal means of human communication, In fact, Nonverbal communication is an essential part of human communication. To a certain extent, effective communication depends on nonverbal messages. It is estimated that no more than 30% of information in social communication is carried out by words, and the other 70% is conveyed through nonverbal means. Ignorance of nonverbal messages will result in incomplete communication. Nonverbal and verbal communication together forms the whole process of communication.The study of nonverbal communication is a new branch of learning. It has been growing rapidly since the 1950's. Since the study of nonverbal communication emerged as an independent discipline, it has aroused the interest of many anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, sociologists and language teachers. There is an increasing amount of research findings in this area.As to what is nonverbal communication, different scholars have different definitions. 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 have potential message value for the source or receiver (Samovar & Porter 2000:149).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...