POLITENESS OF NON-VERBAL INTERACTION IN EFL CLASSROOMS

Abstract

Interpersonal communication is not only expressed explicitly in verbal messages, but it also includes implicit messages, which are expressed through non-verbal behaviours, such as kinesics, paralinguistic, proxemics, and chronemics . Those give salient clues, additional information and meaning, and mark polite or impolite over and above verbal communication (Brown and Levinson, 1987, Farr, 1962 in Jasim, and Aziz, 2010, and Poyatos, 1981: 20). This present study is aimed at discussing politeness of non-verbal interaction between teacher and students in EFL classroom in 4 senior high schools in Semarang Municipality. The data were video-recorded spoken texts from fifteen different classroom settings. Brown and Levinson's (1987) framework of positive politeness and negative politeness is adopted to examine the data. An ethnography analysis reveals that non-verbal interactions between interlocutors emphasize their verbal expressions to convey both positive and negative politeness with various and different forms of non-verbal behaviours. Keywords : non-verbal behaviours, positive politeness, and negative politeness