Chapter One Introduction
This chapter includes three sections. The first section presents the background of the study.The second section offers the significance of this study and the third section explains the overallframework of this thesis.
1.1 Background of the Study
There are two approaches of communication for human being: verbal and nonverbal.Putting forward of the word “nonverbal behavior” aims to compare with “verbal behavior”. Theverbal behavior refers to human being’s language practice, i.e. process and product of usinglanguage of individuals. The nonverbal behavior refers to all communication behavior exceptlanguage practice. Nonverbal communication and verbal communication are essential in theprocess of communication of human being and they complete the whole process ofcommunication by cooperating mutually.Teaching is a sum of a series of communicative processes of a teacher’s lecturing andstudents' learning. Successful English classroom teaching must put successful communication inthe first position (Wiemann, 1975). Teachers not only impart knowledge to students throughtheir verbal behaviors but also convey all kinds of emotions through their nonverbal behaviors,such as expectations, attitudes and encouragement to students. It is not only what you say butalso how you say it that matters a lot to students, which make a great difference.In recent years, along with the reform and open door policies through China and the rapiddevelopment of Chinese economy, development of higher education marches into speedway inwhich development of higher vocational colleges is with irresistible force. But Englishproficiency of the college students declines actually year by year because the number of therecruited students is expanded gradually in higher vocational college. Some students have greatdifficulty in understanding the teaching contents very well and they would lose interests inEnglish learning, which may result in a vicious circle. So it requires the English teachers adoptother methods besides verbal communication to stimulate the students’ interests of learningEnglish. English teachers in higher vocational colleges have been trying their best to attack theproblem from different angles. And most teachers have engaged in the studies of variousteaching methodologies. They believe that teaching method is the most important factor thatshould be considered in the teaching process. However, few of them pay attention to theimportance and functions of nonverbal behavior in the process of teaching and learning. ManyEnglish teachers take it for granted that students can understand what the teacher has said, sothey pay little attention to nonverbal communication with their students and accordingly theycan’t acquire satisfactory result in English teaching and learning. So it is very necessary for us toexplore the nonverbal behaviors of English teachers in English classroom and its influencetowards classroom teaching effect in higher vocational college.Although researchers have probed this problem from many aspects in recent years andmanaged to yield productive results which not only have laid good valuable foundations forfurther academic research and some of them have had foresightedness but also provide avaluable teaching resource for English teachers in higher vocational college to improve Englishteaching and learning effect, it still has its limitations in some res，英语论文网站，英语论文题目 |
