A Study On The Effects Of Teachers' Classroom Nonverbal Behaviors On The Foreign Language Anxiety Of Non-English Major College Students

As a new and exciting branch of science, the study of nonverbal behavior has been uncovered and explored within the last 40 years although nonverbal communication even has a longer history than both oral and written communication. For a long time, people in our daily life normally emphasize the verbal aspect of communication but overlook the nonverbal. As nonverbal communication is so basic that we tend to take it for granted and always ignore it in our English classroom teaching. However, nonverbal communication has powerful influence on English classroom teaching, and nonverbal skills are invaluable for teachers in getting the messages across to class and understanding the messages of interest or messages of confrontations, which are sent through each in many aspects. The study on teachers'nonverbal behavior in classroom instruction is based on human nonverbal behavior in classroom instruction study.At present, there are numerous researches on nonverbal behaviors both abroad and in China. But a majority of researchers focused on the influences of nonverbal behaviors on student-teacher relationship, foreign language achievement and student's etc. Very few related researches were carried out to study the effects of teacher's classroom nonverbal behaviors on student's foreign language anxiety.Foreign language anxiety is a key affective factor in language learning, it is associated with negative feelings such as uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension and tension. The foreign language anxiety here is described as the fear or the apprehension occurring when a learner is expected to perform in the second or foreign language. Language anxiety ranks high among factors influencing language learning, regardless of whether the setting is informal (learning language on the street) or formal (in the language classroom). Gardner and MacIntyre (1993) deem that anxiety is the strongest negative correlate of language achievement. Many researchers and teachers state that anxiety is an affective filter factor, which hinders the enhancement of language capacity. Therefore, the negative effect is much greater than the positive.Most previous studies on foreign language anxiety focus on the field of learner's affective factors to find out ways in reducing it, such as from the perspective of its relationship with attitudes, motivation, and self-esteem. Very few related researches connected it to teacher's classroom nonverbal behaviors.The present study attempts to explore the relationship between teacher's classroom nonverbal behaviors and students'foreign language anxiety, whether or not nonverbal behavior can affect students'FLA (Foreign Language Anxiety). It mainly focuses on two questions: 1) What is the general situation of teachers'nonverbal behaviors in College English classroom? And how are the students satisfied with them? 2) What is the relationship between teacher's classroom nonverbal behaviors and students'foreign language anxiety?The research employed both quantitative and qualitative methods. 70 non-English majors from Huazhong University of Science and Technology participate in the study. The study was conducted in two parts—pretest and posttest. The whole procedure lasted for 10 weeks. At the beginning of the research, i.e. the first week, the questionnaires for evaluation of teacher's classroom nonverbal behavior and students'English learning anxiety were distributed to all participants in class. After the data in the questionnaire of evaluation were collected, the teacher (the author) modified her classroom nonverbal behaviors referring to the results.After ten weeks, all participants retook the questionnaire for foreign language anxiety to finish the posttest. And later the data were used to compare students'English learning anxiety revealed in the pretest and the posttest.The interview was carried out by the author at the end of ten weeks to further prove the hypothesis of the study---the improvements of teacher's classroom nonverbal behaviors have positive effects on lessening students'English learning anxiety. Besides, considering the negative effects which may occur to students after teacher's modification, the author also covered this aspect in the interview.