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Body Language and (English) Language Teaching
by Vijay Kumar Sunwani, PhD
Introduction
Many teachers have a tendency to sit and teach making least use of their bodies. Teachers are the best teaching aids in the classroom. They are knowledgeable, living, loving, responsive to the needs of the students whose questions they try as best to answer. The teaching of English would benefit if we teachers made better use of body language in the classroom. This is what we wish to stress on in this paper, touching only some of the areas.
What is body language?
What we say is vital for communication to happen. What we do while we are saying it can have a dramatic effect on the message that the other person receives. Words and sentence construction form the content. How we say them and what we do while we say them is the context. This is body language. Only about ten per cent of our communication is carried by the words we choose to say. The body says the rest.
Body language is only part of the context. A language without spoken words, body language can be called non verbal communication. We use body language all the time, unconsciously. For instance, looking someone in the eyes means something different from not looking someone in the eyes. The most powerful of these is eye contact. Try and get a waiter’s attention without making eye contact and you'll see how strong the impact of not making eye contact can be. In contact with others, it is just not possible not to be communicating something. There is no credible way of learning new body language gestures. You can begin to choose to turn parts of your body language style up or down for the effect it will have. Yet the body language we use decides the quality of our communication. We can learn to use our body language. We can also learn to understand and interpret body language of others. How we interpret body language depends on the situation, the culture, the relationship we have with the person as well as the gender of the other. It should be noted that body language has different meanings in different cultures. This means that there is not one signal that has the same meaning all over the world. If you do not take this into account you may get yourself in some serious trouble! Therefore it would be good to become conscious of our own and others' body language
Non-verbal communication
Listed below are seven functions of non-verbal communication:
1. Repeating what has already been expressed verbally.(saying yes and nodding at the same time, giving directions and pointing)
2. Replacing the verbal communication
(nodding yes, shaking no, questioning facial expression, gestures)
3. Opposing the verbal communication
(confirming something but shaking your head hesitantly or shrugging your shoulders)
4. Affectionate (instinctive) support of the spoken word
(concerned frown or encouraging pat on the back)
5. Information about the mutual relation
(smiling, eye contact, touching, distance, posture)
6. Emphasizing the verbal communication
(a wagging finger when you express an accusation, or reproaching someone with a loud voice and hitting the table angrily)
7. Structuring and regulating the verbal communication
(the dots and commas of the spoken sentences: hemming, looking at someone and looking away, pauses, and supporting hand gestures)
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