A Study On Body Language Of Pre-service English Teachers

It has been a long time since the beginning of researches on nonverbal communication and body language. Numerous scholars and experts have done continuous researches in this field with many essays and books published. With the development of the research, the theories and application of body language gradually aroused people's attention. Although extensive researches have been done on the nonverbal communication phenomenon in class teaching and certain nonverbal interaction phenomenon have been described, teacher body language as a prominent factor influencing the teaching effect has not been emphasized enough, let alone the discussion on the cultivation of pre-service English teachers'teacher body language.With the development of science and technology, especially the rapid development of computer science, researches on body language becomes much more complicated and advanced than before. The latest findings help people to further understand and make use of proper body languages in various situations. Considering the great potential relevance between teacher body language and the teaching performance levels, the researches on pre-service teachers'body language and even on the training of pre-service teachers'body language is inevitable. And the advanced computer software and hardware will play an important role in more and more body language researches to achieve the precision and scientificity.Considering the subjectivity of teacher body language, the research used one of the most advanced body language research tool-ELAN to annotate and analyze the teacher body language of excellent teachers and pre-service English teachers in the teaching videos on one hand; on the other hand, the relevant research achievements are adopted as analytical items to design a questionnaire of teacher body language to investigate the attitudes and cognitions of pre-service English teachers in four dimensions.Gesture and eye contact are the most frequently used body language in class teaching, and what is more, they are appropriate for observation and annotation with ELAN. Considering the length limitation of the thesis, the current research mainly analyzed these two parts of the body language. Other parts of body language are discussed in a relatively general way.The research takes the hypothesis that there is relevance between the teaching performance level and the level of using English teacher body language; pre-service English teachers with different teaching levels show different levels of using teacher body language.Through a careful analysis, the research is trying to answer the following questions:(1) What is the general status of teacher body language of pre-service English teachers?(2) What are the attitudes and the cognition on teacher body language by pre-service English teachers?(3) Is the pre-service English teachers'body language level relevant to their general teaching performance level?The whole thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction, making clear the research background, research purpose, research questions, research significance and the thesis structure etc. Chapter Two is a literature review related to body language and teacher body language home and abroad. The definitions, classifications, functions etc. are introduced and analyzed in this part. The researches of body language video annotation are also included. Chapter Three is the research design about the three research questions. Questionnaire and ELAN are used as research tools in this chapter. Chapter Four is the analysis and discussion of the results obtained from the questionnaire and the video annotation. Chapter Five is the last part of the thesis, which includes the conclusion of the research, the limitations and some suggestions for the future research.