Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in EFL

Posted on Mar 7, 2025 in Justice

Communication in the Foreign Language Classroom

UNIT 2: Communication in the Foreign Language Classroom. Verbal Communication. Non-Verbal Communication. Extralinguistic Strategies: Non-Verbal Reactions to Messages in Different Contexts.

0. Introduction

Every act that a human being performs has a communicative purpose. Non-verbal language not only supports verbal language but also conveys other meanings that are necessary to code and decode. Since the 1970s, the belief that language is a means of communication has inspired the Communicative Approach. This is based on providing students with enough communicative activities to develop the oral and written skills needed to use the language with accuracy and appropriateness. In this chapter, we will analyze the nature of communication and the ideas and principles of the Communicative Approach to FLT (Foreign Language Teaching). We will also establish the features of verbal and non-verbal language and their pedagogical implications in the English class.

1. Communication in the FL Class

Communication is the understanding which occurs between humans through linguistic and non-linguistic means, like gestures, mimicry, and voice. Whenever communication takes place, there is a speaker or writer and a listener or reader, and both have a communicative purpose, using a medium or channel. When organizing communicative activities, students should have a desire to communicate, a communicative purpose, and they should deal with a variety of language.

1.2. The Communicative Approach in English Teaching

Communication is the main objective in learning a foreign language. Communicating in a foreign language means using that language appropriately, with acceptable correction and fluency. Communicative competence is made up of five sub-competences:

  • Grammatical competence: The ability to use grammar, syntax, and vocabulary.
  • Discourse competence: The ability to interpret the larger context and to construct longer sentences of language so the parts make a coherent whole.
  • Sociolinguistic competence: The ability to use and respond to language appropriately, given the setting, the topic, and the relationship among the people communicating.
  • Strategic competence: The ability to recognize and repair communication breakdowns and how to learn more about the language in the context.
  • Sociocultural competence: The awareness of the cultural reality of the countries where the language is spoken.

1.3. Important Factors in the Communicative Class

  • Input: This is the language to which the student is exposed. The more abundant and varied the input, the better communicative skills the student will develop. The input should be comprehensible to the children, related to the students’ interests, with a level of complexity more advanced than the knowledge that students possess, and it should have enough contextual support.
  • Student groupings: It is important to facilitate flexible and diverse groupings:
    • Whole class: Typically used when introducing or explaining a structure or vocabulary.
    • Pair work: It offers more practice, improves personal relationships, is similar to real life, and increases self-confidence. Problems: more noise, wasting time, impossibility of correcting all couples, risk of students using their mother tongue.
    • Group work: It is ideal for activities of freer production. Fluency is developed, and it encourages cooperative learning.
  • Materials:
    • Text-based materials: Textbooks.
    • Task-based material: Games, role-plays, pair-work activities.
    • Realia: Authentic material such as magazines, videos, and visual resources like maps and symbols. The use of realia materials contributes to reducing the distance between the classroom and the real world.
  • Communicative activities: These refer to tasks that the student carries out for real communication. These activities focus more on the message. The practice of communicative activities will produce an unconscious learning of the structures of the language. A communicative activity must be interactive, unpredictable, within a context, authentic, and developed within a relaxed atmosphere.
  • Teacher and learner roles:
    • Teacher: Nowadays, the teacher has a less dominant role than in traditional teaching. Their roles are: organizer, participant, encourager, language consultant, and monitor.
    • Learner: The learner has a higher involvement in their own learning process. Learner’s opinions, feelings, and motivation are taken into account. They have higher autonomy from the teacher.

2. Verbal Communication

Verbal communication is as important as non-verbal communication. The class is an artificial setting where the teacher tries to recreate the real world. They have to use expressions, drawings, movements, etc., to help in the transmission of the message.

2.1. Oral Communicative Activities

Oral communication is a two-way process between the speaker and the listener. The teacher, therefore, will have to integrate listening and speaking skills through authentic and communicative situations, giving the students two complementary levels of training in verbal communication:

  • Practice stage: Where students practice grammar, vocabulary, and sounds. Students practice accuracy. Activities: guided dialogues, questions, language games, reciting, and singing.
  • Production stage: Where students have opportunities for the expression of personal meaning. Students practice fluency. Activities: information-gap, role-play, problem-solving, personal experiences, communicative games.

2.2. Written Communicative Activities

Learning to write a language is important for three reasons: in order to master a language, in real life we need it to write, and it reinforces the learning of oral communication. Other specific reasons for children:

  • Children usually like writing.
  • Most children expect to be taught to write.
  • Children need a break from oral work.
  • Children work at their own pace, which is relaxing for them.

Activities to provoke written communication: writing instructions, short messages, letters to pen friends, questionnaires, quizzes, puzzles, diaries, project work, and games such as hangman or finding mistakes.

2.3. Classroom Language

The use of a foreign language is suggested in these situations:

  • Beginning of the class: As a warm-up.
  • The date: It allows the review of the days of the week, months, and ordinal numbers.
  • Instructions for beginning an activity: Using imperative verbs such as “look!”
  • Encouraging sentences: Such as “well done!”
  • Correcting: “Try again,” “Can you repeat that?”
  • Finishing the class: “See you next day!”

3. Non-Verbal Communication

It helps to express and understand messages; it favors sociolinguistic competence. In the English class, we can use the following non-verbal language:

  1. Gestures and body language: Facial expressions, posture, eye, and hand movements to transmit attitudes and emotions. Communication with hands in an English classroom is very frequent: pointing to objects, using fingers to count, or expressing temporary concepts.
  2. Physical movements: Children learn a language by listening and executing commands (Total Physical Response – TPR). TPR principles: comprehension abilities precede productive skills. Teaching should focus on meaning, and the teacher should reduce learner stress. Activities: classroom instructions, listen-and-do exercises, or TPR songs like “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.”
  3. Accent and intonation: Intonation is the melody of the sentence. The student should learn how to use intonation correctly to sound like a native speaker.
  4. Visual aids: These have two functions: to shorten the gap between the real world and the classroom and to foster the transmission of the contents of language. The teacher can use them in vocabulary presentation, stories, and communicative activities. Children are attracted to them, and images help to retain what is being learned.
  5. Auditory aids: Sounds, noises, musical melodies, and rhythms have great communicative and pedagogical power. Melodies and rhythms also foster the pronunciation of words, the learning of structures and vocabulary, they transmit cultural elements, and create a pleasant atmosphere in class.

4. Extralinguistic Strategies: Non-Verbal Reactions in Different Contexts

One of the aspects of communicative competence is strategic competence, the student’s capacity to use verbal and non-verbal strategies in order to communicate.

4.1. Pedagogical Reasons to Use Extralinguistic Strategies

  • Oral understanding precedes oral production.
  • Non-verbal answers reduce anxiety.
  • Greater independence in the communicative process.

4.2. Non-Verbal Reactions in Different Contexts

It is important to design activities that help develop the gestural capacity of students and allow them to transfer information from the verbal to the non-verbal code and vice versa.

  • Activities from the verbal to the non-verbal code: Perform actions (TPR), mimicry, and picture dictation.
  • Activities from the non-verbal to the verbal code: Games like Pictionary or “Who is Who?”.

Drama is also very important in foreign language teaching because verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication are put together as it occurs in real-life situations.