| Human beings communicate through two channels, verbal communication and nonverbal communication. Body language belongs to nonverbal communication. Body language is the nonverbal specific position or movements people adopt in the process of communication to convey information, to express feelings and to show attitudes. Body language plays a very important role in human communication. The culture-specific body language in the English language teaching also calls for our due attention.In non-verbal communication, body language has following functions: emphasizing or repeating the information, replenishing or adding the information, substituting, showing emotions or attitudes.The physical and psychological character of students, the relation between verbal and nonverbal communication, the economic globalization determines the necessity of utilizing body language in English classes. In English classes, body language has functions of organizing, demonstrating and suggesting. It can be used in different types of teaching, such as phonetics teaching, vocabulary teaching, grammar teaching and conversation teaching. The analysis of teaching practice indicates that the usage of body language exerts influences on the effect of teaching to a great extent.China's modernization demands that the culture of English-speaking countries should be permeated in English teaching. Therefore, the teaching of culture-related body language must be involved. The body language teaching is aimed to convey and receive the communicative information more accurately and appropriately, and enable the learners to avoid the cultural misunderstanding and conflict. For this purpose, teachers can take the measure of demonstrating performance, audio-visual media and text analysis.In brief, it is very necessary to use body language appropriately to assist the teaching. Moreover, we should heighten the awareness of intercultural differences between body languages to foster the students' ability of intercultural communication.
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