Nonverbal Communication in College English Classroom Teaching

Abstract

Human communication can be divided into two categories: verbal communication and nonverbal communication, where verbal means is commonly considered to be the most important, efficient, powerful means of communication. Over decades, much attention has been given to the research on verbal communication, while a very important fact was neglected: in face-to-face communication, the use of nonverbal communication is more common than that of verbal communication, and it is an essential part of human communication, which plays a significant role. Ignorance of nonverbal messages will result in incompleteness. In the past two decades, college English teaching has made great achievements. Yet problems still prevail. Daily classroom teaching is still inefficient although a lot of time and money has been spent on. One of the reasons for that is that nonverbal communication is neglected in daily classroom teaching. Teachers’ nonverbal communication plays an important role in college English classroom teaching. Many studies find that teachers should learn to use nonverbal communication to improve the quality of classroom teaching. A famous scholar Cooper holds that if the teacher knows how to use nonverbal communication more efficiently. The relationship between the teacher and students will be improved, and the recognitive ability and learning efficiency of the students will also be developed.