Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication:
This topic deals with verbal and non-verbal communication in English class.
This topic is relevant for us, English teachers of Primary Education stage, because communication in the target language is both, our goal and the means to achieve the goal.
Interpersonal communication and public speaking are the two basic types of oral verbal communication. Interpersonal generally refers to a two-way exchange that involves both talking and listening whereas public speaking involves one or more people delivering a message to a group.
Written verbal communication may take different forms, including letters, faxes, emails, newspapers, magazines, articles, hand written notes, announcements, etc.
On the other hand, non-verbal communication includes many different things that are used to convey meaning and messages, such as paralanguage, eye-contact, facial expressions, posture, gestures, hap tics, proxemics, artifacts and surrounding factors.
-Paralanguage refers to non-verbal elements in speech, such as rhythm, stress and intonation; voice, inflection or emphasis, pitch and volume of the voice, and speaking style.
-Eye contact or gaze can indicate interest, attention, and involvement. Gaze comprises the actions of looking while talking, looking while listening, amount of gaze, and frequency of glances, patterns of fixation, pupil dilation, and
blink rate.
-Facial expressions are can express many different emotions, such as anger, fear, sadness, joy and disgust.
-Posture refers to the way sit, stand, lean, bend, and move our body. Posture can affect the way others perceive us.
-A gesture is a bodily movement intended to express meaning. They may be articulated with the hands, arms or body, and also include movements of the head, face and eyes, such as winking, nodding, or rolling one's eyes. A person who fails to gesture whiles speaking may be perceived as boring, stiff and unanimated.
-Haptics refers to touches that communicate and include things such a handshake. Holding hands, kissing (cheek, lips, hand), back slapping, a pat on the shoulder, etc. The meaning conveyed from touch is highly dependent upon the context of the
situation, the relationship between communicator, and the manner of touch.
-Proxemics refers to the concept of territorial space and refers to the area around the self that we perceive as "our" space. Proxemics is largely culture dependent. We distinguish four distance zones: intimate, personal, social and public.
-Artifac include objects which can act as non-verbal stimuli, with interacting persons.
These artifacts can be: perfume, clothing.
-Surrounding factors is a category that includes those elements that intervene in human relations which are not a direct part of it: furniture, interior decoration.
It is important to point out that when we interact with others we normally use both types of communication, though we are not always aware of the non-verbal element. In fact, most social psychologists agree that non-verbal communication makes up about two-thirds of
communication between speaker and listener or listeners.
In other words, human interaction involves both types of communication, verbal and non-verbal, and this applies to classroom interaction as well. In fact, we could argue that non-verbal communication is even more important in the foreign language classroom because facial expression, gestures and other non-verbal ingredients can aid communication by making up for students' lack of linguistic resources. For example, a speaker who is just beginning to learn English may point to an object and say "this". That single word may be understood by the listener as "I want that one over there".
The teacher is an important source of language input for students, and students need to understand the input provided by the teacher in order for learning to take place. Non-verbal language is essential in making the input comprehensible to students. When we tell the class a story, we may want to introduce new vocabulary or a new structure. The story provides the context where the language is comprehensible and meaningful to students, and the teacher achieves this by making extensive use of non-verbal communication. We help students understand language by accompanying our words with eye-contact, gestures artifacts (flashcards), and by using paralinguistic features of our voice: emphasis, intonation, volume, etc. Non-verbal communication is essential for comprehensible input and as teachers we need to be aware of the potential of non-verbal communication in our classes.
Some pupils are by nature good non-verbal communicators, but others are not, so we need to encourage using non-verbal strategies in class. There are different ways to do this, for instance: total physical response (TPR) activities, action songs, and games and activities that involve non-verbal communication, for example gamesthat use miming.
Conclusion:
Since our main aim as teachers of a FL is to help students communicate in the target language, it is quite obvious that the target language, English, should be the language of communication and interaction in English class. This refers to communication and interaction between teacher-students and between and among students. And on the other hand we must also acknowledge the importance of extralinguistic or non-verbal strategies in the language-learning process, and consequently we should help students acquire and put into practice any strategies that may help them become better communicators. In this way we help progress in basic competence number 1 of our curriculum, which is: competence in linguistic communication.