Case Study On Excellent Teachers' Nonverbal Communication In English Classroom Of Senior High School

Human communication can be divided in two types, namely verbal communication and nonverbal communication. People pay more attention to the study of verbal communication and this does not exclude the field of English teaching. What they do not realize or forget to consider is the fact that many cues are exchanged through nonverbal communication and that is how information is mostly transmitted. Samovar believes that in the face-to-face communication only 35% of information is transmitted through speech, the rest is carried via nonverbal cues. Professor Ray Birdwhistell of University of Pennsylvania in the United States of America makes estimations of verbal and nonverbal languages in an interpersonal dialogue. He believes verbal communication is only 30% of the whole communication process; therefore nonverbal communication plays a very significant role in the communication process.Nonverbal communication is important to the field of English teaching. The English teaching process is a combination of knowledge instruction and absorption. A successful class relies on a successful classroom communication, which should contain both verbal communication and nonverbal communication between teacher and students. It should be noted here that the teacher plays a very important role in the whole classroom communication, and most of the information is transmitted by nonverbal cues. Teachers use nonverbal hints to express their expectation from students, commends and their pride in the works of the students which in-turn has a positive influence on the students and the classroom atmosphere as a whole.This study used three teachers who received awards for the excellent English teaching by the China Basic Foreign Language Education Research and Training Centre and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in Qingdao in November 2009. The study was based on the Nonverbal Communication Theory and Cooper's theory of nonverbal communication in the classroom. It analyzed the teachers'classroom nonverbal communication in four aspects, namely, environmental language, object language, body language and paralanguage. Three teachers were chosen as targets of the study. The teachers were Lee Jinqian, Sun Lixin and Ding Qian who are prize winners for the sixth time of the Secondary Schools English Teaching Demonstration and Symposium of China. The qualitative and quantitative research methods will be used to analyze the importance of teachers'nonverbal communication in the classroom. The purpose of the thesis is to provide some inspirations to senior high teachers in English Teaching. In the case study process, record of teachers'nonverbal communication is made according to the video at first, and then followed the vertical and horizontal comparison of the collected original data. The results demonstrate that excellent teachers can make full use of their nonverbal behavior to help improve teacher-student relationship, adjust classroom atmosphere, advance students cognitive ability and then improve students' cognitive learning abilities. Therefore, teachers'nonverbal communication in the classroom has a profound meaning to English teaching. The way a good teacher uses nonverbal communication could provide guidance to other teachers to emulate. Based on the little research on excellent teachers'nonverbal communication by means of quantitative research at the present time, case study on excellent teachers'nonverbal communication in the classroom has been studied from various aspects in this paper, and it is hoped that this case study can make contribution to the study of English teachers'nonverbal communication.