Tema 2

- LA COMUNICACIÓN EN CLASE DE LENGUA EXTRANJERA: COMUNICACIÓN VERBAL

Y NO VERBAL.
- ESTRATEGIAS EXTRALINGUÍSTICAS: REACCIONES NO VERBALES A MENSAJES EN
DIFERENTES CONTEXTOS.

Every act that we perform has a communicative purpose. Language is the most complex
system of signs, but it is not the only one: facial expressions, gestures or intonation also
communicate something.
Traditional Foreign Language Teaching focused on teaching items of language in isolation
and its main aim was to read texts. It could be said that people learnt about the language
(learning) but could not use it in a real context, since the focus was not on communication, but
on a piece of language. However, in the last decades, the movement towards a Communicative
Approach has been a remarkable tendency in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language. This
Approach is based on providing the student with enough communicative activities to develop the
oral and written skills needed to use the language with accuracy and appropriateness. This view
focuses on communicative proficiency rather than on the mastery of structures and vocabulary.
Due to the influence of this Approach, our current education system has incorporated this
functional and communicative potential of language in its objectives and methodology, the
ultimate goal being the development of the students´ communicative competence, which at the
same time, is one of the general objectives for Primary Education established by The Organic
Law on Education 2/2006 passed on the 3rd of May (LOE).

Based on this view, the present essay aims to study communication in an EFL classroom and
more precisely, to develop the concept of verbal and non-verbal communication. For this
purpose, I will divide the topic into three main sections. In the first part, I will deal with the
concept of communication. In order to do so, I will briefly provide a definition of
communication. Then, I will address the types and the nature of communication. In the second
part, I will deal with communication in the classroom by developing the concepts of
Communicative Approach and verbal and non-verbal communication. In the third part, I will
explain the Total Physical Response Method developed by James Asher, which puts the
emphasis on the role of movement in connection with learning.

We deal with an essential topic since communication is the basis of understanding among
human beings. In addition to that, the Foreign Language Curriculum for Primary Education
emphasizes the significance of this topic by including in its objectives, blocks of contents and
assessment criteria the development of oral and written communication, including strategies to
support listening, speaking, reading and writing.

FIRST
To develop the topic, I will deal with the communication theory. For this purpose, I will firstly
present the definition of communication. Second, I will discuss the main types of
communication.
Finally, I will attempt to identify the nature of communication.

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 Traditionally, communication has been defined as the exchange of meanings between
individuals through a common system of symbols . Communication refers to the transmission of
information (a message) between a sender and a receiver, using a signalling system.

After having discussed the definition of communication, let us deal with the different types
of communication.
Communication can be either verbal or non-verbal. On the one hand, verbal communication is
carried out through symbols known as words and it can be either oral or written. On the other
hand, non-verbal communication is in Geoffrey Finch´s words “communication that takes place
other than through words”.
As we can see, there are many forms of communication and language is just one of these
forms. All these are the subject matter of semiotics which is the general theory of signs and
symbolism. In this light, Crystal developed the following aspects of semiotics which are related
to language according to its nature:

 Firstly, Auditory-vocal: speech, musical effects and voice qualities.

 Secondly, Visual: sign languages, writing codes and Kinesics.
 Thirdly, Tactile: deaf and blind languages, secret codes and Proxemics.
 Lastly, Olfactory and gustatory: Communication through smell and the symbolism of food
and taste.

As Crystal argued, some of these aspects have a linguistic nature, such as speech, deaf and
blind sign languages, and written languages. The communicative use of the visual and tactile
modes in their non-linguistic aspects is referred to as non-verbal communication or body
language.

Now that the types of communication have been established, I will go on to address the
nature of communication. Communication between humans is a very complex phenomenon which
involves many variables, such as the participants, the context and the purpose. Whenever
communication takes place, there is a speaker (or writer) and a listener (or reader) and they
both have a communicative purpose which can be having a conversation or greeting each other.
Scholars have found certain characteristics which seem to apply in every situation. In
addition, if we want our teaching to be really communicative, these characteristics must be
followed. On the one hand, I assume with Jeremy Harmer that when one person speaks:

1. He wants to speak (he wants to say something)

2. He has a communicative purpose (he says certain things because he wants something to
happen as a result of what he says)
3. He selects from his language stores (he has an infinite capacity to create new
sentences, because as Noam Chomsky advocated in his Generative Grammar, “with a finite
set of elements, a speaker can create an infinite number of utterances ”)

On the other hand, I also assume that when a person listens:

1. He wants to listen to something.

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 2. He is interested in the purpose of what is being said.
3. He processes a variety of language.

Thus, when organizing communicative activities in the classroom, teachers must ensure that
the activities that the students are involved in share the process I have just described, that
means that the students should have a desire to communicate, have a communicative purpose
and deal with a variety of language, either receptively or productively.

To finish off this section, notice that these factors were not traditionally taken into account
when designing language learning activities. It is only with the advent of the Communicative
Approach to language teaching that real communication enters to classroom.

SECOND
Now that the concept of communication has been developed, I will go on to develop the second
part of the topic, that is, communication in the classroom, where both verbal and non-verbal
communication take place. First, I will deal with the evolution of the Communicative Approach
and how the Communicative Competence is central in nowadays education. Then, I will deal with
the verbal communication: in order to do so, I will explain the Communicative Language Teaching
method, and the activities used in the classroom as well as the teacher and learner´s roles.
Then, I will highlight the importance of the non-verbal communication and I will illustrate the
Total Physical Response method.
First, I will present the origins of the Communicative Approach that changed language
teaching methods. This approach is one of the principles on which foreign language methodology
is based on at the moment. In the 1970s, humanistic psychology theories started to be
introduced for educative purposes. This changed the main aim of the education: from “teaching”
to “learning” and from “teacher” to “learner”. As a result of this, the Communicative Approach
came up, and its first representation was the Communicative Language Teaching. The worldwide
importance of this approach was due to the increasing interest of the Council of Europe in the
communicative competence and the necessity to develop procedures aimed to teach the four
language skills.
Apart from the already mentioned humanistic theories, Linguistics studies suffered a
revolution. Some scholars, the best known of them is Dell Hymes, set up the concept of
Communicative Competence, which is the ability to use a language in an appropriate way. This
concept was deliberately contrary to Chomsky´s Linguistic Competence, who tried to explain
how a child learns a language. For Chomsky, competence simply implied the knowledge of the
language system. Hymes maintained that Chomsky´s theory was incomplete, and that a
communicative and cultural dimension should be incorporated. According to him, a speaker does
not only need the ability to use grammatical structures, but also to learn how to use those
structures in a community (appropriateness). In other words, Hymes stated that in order to
learn a language, a native speaker does not only need to utter grammatically correct forms (as
Chomsky thought), he also has to know the rules of use, that is, where and when to use a
sentence, and to whom. Thus, Hymes replaced Chomsky´s notion of Competence with his own
concept of Communicative Competence, and distinguished four aspects, all of which refer to
native speakers:

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  Systematic potential: A native speaker possesses a potential for creating language.
 Appropriacy: A native speaker knows what language is appropriate in a given situation, in a
particular context.
 Occurrence: A native speaker knows how often something is said in the language and act
accordingly.
 Feasibility: A native speaker knows whether something is possible in the language, although
some structures are grammatically correct, they are not possible in the language.

These four categories have been adopted for teaching purposes.

Later on, linguists Canale and Swain expanded the previous description of Hymes, establishing
five subcompetences of the Communicative Competence. As a result of this, Communicative
Competence for Foreign Language Learners comprises five subcompetences:

 Grammar competence: It refers to the ability to put into practice the linguistic units
according to the rules of use established in the linguistic system, for instance, the mastery
of grammatical structures and vocabulary.
 Discoursive competence: The ability to us different types of discourse and organise them
according to the communicative situation and the speakers involved in it, using cohesion and
coherence.
 Sociolinguistic competence: The ability to adequate the utterances to the specific context
according to the accepted usage of a particular linguistic community.
 Strategic competence: The ability to define or make adjustments in the course of the
communicative situation, and the capacity to use verbal and non-verbal strategies in order
to make communication effective.
 Sociocultural competence: A certain knowledge of the social and cultural context in which
the Foreign Language is used.

The concept of Communicative Competence is also present in our education system. The
Organic Law of Education 2/2006 passed on the 3rd of May, highlights the importance of
developing both oral and written skills in the three different cycles of Primary Education. More
precisely, the Royal Decree 1513/2006 passed on the 7th of December divides the contents into
four blocks which are listening, speaking and conversing; reading and writing; knowledge of the
language; and sociocultural aspects and intercultural awareness. All these contents aim to help
Primary students become communicative competent in the FL.

After having analysed the foundations of the Communicative Approach, I will focus my
attention on the concept of verbal communication and the Communicative Language Teaching
Approach.
Verbal communication is carried out through symbols known as “words”. It is the process of
sending and receiving messages with words, including oral, writing and sign language. It is
intended to develop the ability of a language-user to produce not only a linguistically correct
speech utterance but also a communicative appropriate utterance as well.
In this light, it is important to know the Communicative Language Teaching approach
developed by Wilkins. This approach has been the major teaching approach since the early 80´s

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and it organizes the contents to teach around notions (that are concepts the learner needs in
order to communicate) and functions (speech acts of the communicative functions).
According to Hadley, the main characteristics of the Communicative Language Teaching are:

 Meaning and contextualisation are basic principles.

 Learners are encouraged to communicate from the beginning of the instruction.
 Activities and strategies for learning are varied according to learner´s preferences and
needs
 Communicative Competence is the goal of the instruction.

As regards to the activities within this approach, also applicable to the rest of communicative
methods, according to Harmer, they should have the following characterisitics: they should
raise the desire to communicate; have a communicative purpose; be based on content, not form;
use a variety of language; have no teacher intervention and no material´s control.

Next, I will focus my attention on the teacher and learner´s roles in the Communicative
Language Teaching.

o On the one hand, the teacher should modify the curriculum content in order to adequate
it to his/her students´ level, keep the motivation of his/her students, attend the
individual differences of the learners and organise the learning experience carefully and
in advanced. Moreover, in the Communicative Approach, the teacher´s roles contrast with
the authoritarian roles of traditional teaching. In this sense, the teacher is an informant,
a facilitator, a participant and a monitor in the classroom.
o On the other hand, due to the learner-centred teaching, the student´s role has changed
within the last years. In this sense, students do not learn in an individualistic way, but in
an interdependent way. The emphasis is therefore on the process of communication and
not on the mastery of language forms: successful communication can only be achieved
through group interaction. Moreover, in the Communicative Approach, the learner´s roles
also differ from traditional language teaching. Learners were seen as stimulus-response
mechanisms whose learning depended upon repetitive practice. Today, this passive role
has become an active one, in the sense that the learner is more involved in his/her own
learning process and that his opinion, feelings and motivation are taking into account.

Now that we know a little bit more about verbal communication and the Communicative
Language Teaching, it is important to note that communication is not purely verbal.
Communication uses a whole set of paralinguistic devices such as gestures, body
movements, paralanguage, proxemics, etc. We could say that, while linguistic abilities may
operate on a verbal layer, communicative abilities operate on both the verbal and the non-
verbal layers. For this reason, I´m going to present the notion of non-verbal communication,
which Geoffrey Finch defined as “communication which takes place other than through
words”.
For years, non-verbal communication has been neglected in the teaching of languages.
However, nowadays its importance is recognized, because:

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 It helps to express and to understand messages, when the Communicative Competence is
not very high.
 It favours sociolinguistic competence.
 It is highly attractive and motivating for children.

In the English class, we can use the following non-verbal language:

 Gestures and body language: It is also called non vocal because the human voice is not
involved. It includes facial expression, posture, eye and hand movement…for instance
point to objects or use fingers to count numbers.
 Physical movements: There is a theory in the teaching of languages called Total Physical
Response by James Asher, based on the theory that a child acquires language by listening
and executing command from adults, such as “stand up” or “sit down”.
 Accent and intonation: It is also called vocal because they are aspects of the language
which accompany the words we pronounce.
 Visual aids: Visual aids have two functions: to shorten the gap between the real world
and the classroom and to help the students to understand the message. As the saying
goes “One image is worth a thousand words”.
 Auditory aids: Such as sounds or noises, have great communicative power, just like visual
aids.
THIRD
In recent times, certain attempts have been made to use extralinguistic responses to
linguistic messages in the language classroom. The best known is the Total Physical Response
method. I will focus on its main features, how a T.P.R. based curriculum works and, finally,
the teacher and learner´s role in this method, in which the non-verbal communication is
predominant.
The Total Physical Response method, developed by James Asher, is related with the
educational and psychological development, language teaching and humanistic pedagogy. Its
main aim is to teach oral proficiency through physical activity at a beginner´s level.
The main features of T.P.R. method are:

 Comprehension precedes production in learning a language.

 The teaching of speaking should b delayed until comprehension skills are established.
 Teaching should emphasise on meaning rather than on form.
 Teaching should minimise learner stress.

The general objective of the TPR is to teach oral proficiency through physical activity at a
beginner´s level. A few examples of command students respond to in a relatively early
training will serve to illustrate this methodology:

 Listening Training: students sit in a semicircle around the teacher. The teacher asks
them to be silent, listen to a command in English, and then, do exactly what he does.
 Production: After about ten hours of training in listening, students are invited but not
pressured to reverse roles with the instructor and give their own commands in English.
 Reading or writing: At the end of each class, students copy the expressions in their
notebooks.
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 Regarding the role of the teacher and the learner, according to Asher, the teacher is the
director of a play and the students are the actors. In this sense, the teacher will have to
use gestures and mime actions in order to enable the students to fully understand what we
want them to do. As it is also stated by Stephen Krashen in the Input Hypothesis taken from
his Monitor Model, one of our main objectives is to provide children with as much
comprehensible input as we can while they are doing an enjoyable activity. Students have the
primary roles of listeners and performers.

Conclusion

To conclude, I would like to remark that, as I have proven in this topic, communication
plays a vital role in almost every aspect of our lives. People communicate with others almost
all the time either verbally or non-verbally.
We as teachers should be aware of the importance of both verbal and non-verbal
communication in the classroom and how we can maximize verbal and non-verbal items to
encourage children to infer meaning and use all sorts of extralinguistic strategies to
improve communication.
By means of meaningful, motivating activities which use aspects such as body movement,
gestures, objects, the five senses and so on, we can motivate students to believe that
communicating in the foreign language is within their reach.

In this topic, I have presented the concept of communication and its main types. Then, I
have developed the Communicative Approach and how it has influenced our current education
system. After that, I have focused on verbal communication and the Communicative Language
Teaching Approach developed by Wilkins. Finally, I have highlighted the importance of non-
verbal communication and I have illustrated the TPR method developed by James Asher.

In order to develop this topic, the following bibliography has been used:
 Crystal, D. “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language” Cambridge University Press
1997.
 Dell Hymes “On Communicative Competence in Sociolinguistics” Penguin, London,
1972.
 Harmer, J. “The Practice of English Language Teaching” Longman, London 1983.
 Asher, J. “ Learning another language through actions: The Complete teacher´s
guide book” Los Gatos, Cal. Sky Oaks Production 1982.
 BREWSTER, J. et al. (2003): The Primary English Teacher‘s Guide. Penguin English.
HARMER, J. (2003): The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.
LARSEN-FREEMAN, D. (2003): Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching.
Oxford University Press.
 VARELA, R. et al. (2003): All About Teaching English. Centro de Estudios Ramón
Areces.

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