Application Of Nonverbal Communication In College English Classroom Teaching

As a new scientific subject, Nonverbal communication only began in 1950 s, but many nonverbal behaviors exerted their own functions and displayed characteristics in the process of communicating with others. Although some achievements have been made in the past, as for college English classroom teaching in China, these achievements are still difficult to make up for the deficiencies that the problem of time-consuming and inefficient college English classroom teaching happened in our country. In fact, cultivating college students’ intercultural communicative competence is regarded as one of the teaching goals, but the majority of teachers and students always pay little attention to this teaching goal. As is known to all, communicative competence consists of intercultural communicative competence and intercultural nonverbal communicative competence, it’s a pity that many college English teachers are not aware of the importance of cultivating students’ intercultural nonverbal communicative competence when they are having classes. For a long time, we tend to concentrate on studying English phonetics, vocabulary, grammar as well as teaching methodology in the process of researching college English classroom teaching activities, and ignore cultivating college students’ intercultural communicative ability which is considered to be important for college students to cultivate intercultural communicative awareness and intercultural communicative competence. In fact, cultivating college students’ intercultural communicative awareness and competence is regarded as an important part of college English teaching.This thesis will explain the application of nonverbal communication in college English classroom teaching on the basis of the definition of nonverbal communication proposed by Potter and Samovar, and it tends to make a systematic research about nonverbal communication from the aspect of its history, definition, function and the relation between nonverbal communication and culture. Besides, this thesis will use some examples and comparative analysis to study the issue that how college English teachers take the advantage of nonverbal behaviors to have classes, as well as the issue that whether nonverbal behaviors is essential to improve college English teachers’ teaching quality and college students’ interest in learning English. In order to achieve this goal, the author randomly selects 100 freshmen from law and artistic department in Guizhou Normal University as the experimental subjects, which are divided into class A and class B. In the two classes, they were taught by the traditional teaching method which involves listening, speaking, reading and writing and the teaching method which focuses on the application of nonverbal behaviors. The results of the questionnaires and the interview show that college English teachers and students are not getting a comprehensive understanding of nonverbal communication knowledge, and insufficient nonverbal communication have negative effects on classroom teaching, and also find that the students in the in the two classes are different in understanding nonverbal behaviors. These research results offer a sign for college English classroom teaching method: college English classroom teaching should be closely associated with nonverbal behaviors, in order to improve college English teaching quality.The first part of this thesis introduces research background, purpose, significance and structure of the paper. The second part mainly talks about literature review of this thesis. The third part is to describe the theoretical framework and research methods of this paper. The fourth chapter elaborates the specific application of nonverbal behaviors in college English classroom teaching. The fifth chapter analyzes the quantitative and qualitative data of the research results. The last part summarizes the basic viewpoint above, and proposes some suggestions for teachers to use their nonverbal behaviors to improve teaching proficiency.