A Research On English Teacher's Classroom Nonverbal Behavior In Primary School

At present,primary school English teacher's quality of professional development comes from teaching practice.During the teaching process,teachers mainly focus on verbal behavior,for example,how to organize and express language can be easily understood by students.They are not familiar with the concept of classroom nonverbal behavior.In 1960 s,Asher,an American psychological professor at the St.Joseph University in California proposed TPR(Total Physical Response).He advocates that students should be able to experience the pleasure of learning a second language,even as easily as their mother tongue.This approach combines language and behavior,so teachers can teach foreign language through behavior.English,as a second language,is so novel and unfamiliar to the pupils that teachers need to fully understand their rules of physical and mental development and their cognitive level,then appropriately apply some nonverbal behaviors during the English teaching,which can arouse their enthusiasm for English learning.There are a lot of researches on teachers' nonverbal behavior in China,but there are few researches on the classroom nonverbal behaviors of English teachers in primary school,so I choose this topic to carry out my research.There are five chapters in this paper,specifically as follows:The first chapter is the brief introduction.It mainly introduces the background,purpose,significance of the paper and the concept of “teacher's nonverbal behavior”.The second chapter is the literature review,including the relative researches on teacher's nonverbal behavior at home and abroad,the researches on the function of teacher's nonverbal behavior and the main theory of teacher's nonverbal behavior—the theory of educational psychology.The third chapter is about the present situation and analysis of the elementary school English teachers' nonverbal behavior.This paper mainly uses questionnaire survey and interview.The questionnaires are divided into two versions: teachers and students and respectively delivered to 18 English teachers and 264 students in grade3-5 of the S Shanghai primary school.Teacher's questionnaire is based on three dimensions,including the teacher's understanding of the concept and function of nonverbal behavior,the use of nonverbal behavior and its practical impact and the thinking of the nonverbal behavior development.It mainly discusses the primaryschool English teacher's understanding and application of classroom nonverbal behavior.Student's questionnaire depends on three dimensions,including students' attitudes towards English learning and their English teachers,the observation and perception of their English teachers' nonverbal behaviors,and the expectations of the English class and their English teachers.It aims at testing whether the questionnaire results are objective.In addition,this paper makes an interview outline on the basis of questionnaire content,and randomly selects 9 English teachers of grade 3-5 in Shanghai S primary school to make a supplement to the paper.The fourth chapter is the analysis of the existing problems and suggestions for improvement.Based on the results of the present investigation,we find out the existing problems in primary school English teacher's understanding and application of nonverbal behavior.Then the paper tries to put forward some suggestions for primary school English teachers to refer and put into practice by analyzing the causes of the problems from the external objective factors and subjective factors of teachers.The fifth chapter is the conclusion of this paper and the shortcomings.