Optimizing Language Learners’ Nonverbal Behavior: From Tenet to Technique (Second Language Acquisition, 112) - Softcover

Gregersen, Dr. Tammy; MacIntyre, Dr. Peter D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783097353 ISBN 13: 9781783097357

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2017

Synopsis

This book highlights the pivotal role that nonverbal behavior plays in target language communication, affect and cognition. It integrates research tenets and video demonstrations of nonverbal behavior with structured activities that will guide teachers and learners of any language to capitalize on the nonverbal means at their disposal. It does not shy away from the challenges that nonverbal communication poses in target language communication, including issues of personal and cultural identity that emerge with languages around the world. With its easy-to-use format, solid research support, and fully integrated activities and videos, this book is an essential resource for anyone interested in working with the nonverbal dimensions of communication. The text will be especially valuable for language educators, pre- and in-service teachers who are looking for classroom resources and ideas, who want to create positive classroom environments and want to improve learner interaction and communication while increasing language proficiency. This book is a valuable resource for anyone who interacts with other people in more than one language.

About this title

About the Authors

Tammy Gregersen is Professor of TESOL at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. She has published extensively on individual differences, teacher education, nonverbal communication in language classrooms, positive psychology, and language teacher wellbeing. She was awarded two Fulbright Scholar opportunities in Costa Rica and Chile.

Peter D. MacIntyre is Professor of Psychology at Cape Breton University, Canada. He has published over 100 articles, chapters and books within the field of psychology of language and communication and has received awards for teaching excellence (Atlantic Association of Universities), for contributions to the study of language (the Gardner Award and the Mildenberger Prize) and awards for service to students and the community.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Optimizing Language Learners' Nonverbal Behavior

From Tenet to Technique

By Tammy Gregersen, Peter D. MacIntyre

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2017 Tammy Gregersen and Peter D. MacIntyre
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78309-735-7

Contents

Notes for Readers, 
Foreword, 
Preface, 
Part 1: Introduction, 
Part 2: Codes, 
Part 3: Activities, 
Conclusion – Nonverbal Positive Communication, 
References, 
Author Index, 
Subject Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

One night while in Spain reporting on the news of the Civil War, French writer and journalist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, found himself with numerous pistol barrels shoved forcefully into his belly. Beneath the cloak of darkness, insurgent rebels had crept up and captured him only later to be saved by the miracle of a simple smile.

The soldiers and their captive descended into the poorly lit bowels of a basement where other militia were dozing with their guns propped up between their legs. Saint-Exupéry was searched and thrown into a cell. Although he did not speak Spanish, he understood sufficient Catalan to realize that his captors were demanding his identification. He attempted to communicate that his documents were at his hotel and that he was a journalist, but they merely handed around his camera, without expression. Following a tortuous interim of observing his abductors, Saint-Exupéry grew increasingly desperate. What occurred next in that place was driven by the simplest, most profound form of shared humanity.

As the Frenchman had no cigarettes and one of his Spanish guards was smoking, Saint-Exupéry requested through the use of gesture and 'showing the vestige of a smile,' if the guard would be willing to share one. His captor stretched, deliberately wiped his hand across his brow, raised his eyes to meet Saint-Exupéry's, and, to his profound astonishment, the guard attempted to return his smile. For the journalist, 'it was like the dawning of the day':

This miracle did not conclude the tragedy, it removed it altogether, as light does shadow. There had been no tragedy. This miracle altered nothing visible. The feeble oil lamp, the table scattered with papers, the men propped against the wall, the colors, the smell, everything remained unchanged. Yet everything was transformed in its very substance. That smile saved me. It was a sign just as final, as obvious in its future consequences, as unchangeable as the rising of the sun. It marked the beginning of a new era ... And I was aware of a connection.

Nothing had been spoken, yet everything was resolved. Saint-Exupéry concludes his account with thoughtful insight into the celebrated universality and invigorating power of that one simple gesture, the human smile:

Care granted to the sick, welcome offered to the banished, forgiveness itself are worth nothing without a smile enlightening the deed. We communicate in a smile beyond languages, classes and parties. We are faithful members of the same church, you with your customs, I with mine.

Saint-Exupéry's account of this incident that rendered a smile as the difference between life and death demonstrates how hard it would be to overstate the importance of nonverbal communication in human interaction. This story reveals that the nonverbal often supersedes language and brings human communication to a deeper, more meaningful level – in every facet of interpersonal interaction. In this particular example, our protagonists did not share the same language, yet they connected through a smile. They communicated. Our purpose in this book is to bring the realization of the importance of nonverbal communication to teachers and learners alike as they work together in cultivating greater communicative, affective and cognitive competence in a target language (TL).

Our concern for nonverbal communication in its many forms emerges in part from our prior work on emotions in second language communication. The specific emotion that has been studied most extensively is language anxiety and we have written about it elsewhere (Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014). Our thinking often is shaped by the experiences of anxious learners and speakers who are having difficulty in getting their message across. Some readers may get the impression that the disproportionate number of discussions about anxiety reflects the notion that all learners must be anxious. Of course there are those who do not experience much anxiety at all. But we hasten to note that, even among confident individuals, when anxiety does arise it is an emotion that can be difficult to ignore – it demands attention! As discussions of language anxiety appear throughout the text, consider it as an example or representation of an emotion that can be expressed nonverbally.

The Verbal-Nonverbal Link

'If verbal communication is the pen which spells out details, nonverbal communication provides the surface on which the words are written and against which they must be interpreted.' When Stevick (1982: 163) bestowed such importance on nonverbal communication he seemed to be warning that a disregard of nonlinguistic channels in favor of a focalized interest on language alone would cause a huge part of the communication process to go unnoticed. Unheeded would go the very signals that enhance the meaning of learners' TL utterances, promote positive affect and enrich learning. In effect, the inextricable and highly complex relationship between the verbal and nonverbal dimensions of behavior operates communicatively, emotionally and cognitively. The multifunctional nature of nonverbal behavior facilitates interpersonal meaning-making, conveys feelings and attitudes, and enhances thinking and learning – and sometimes all at the same time. In a split second, we can travel the entire 'inter-' to 'intra-' personal communication continuum as our body movements and voices externalize our private understanding of an idea for another person, aid us in developing this understanding, and simultaneously transmit how we feel about it. Vygotsky (1997: 114) once said that contemplating the body apart from the mind is like attempting to 'separate the heat from the sun,' and although this simile is full of wisdom, it is missing a key piece. We would like to attach the addendum: Consider the heart as well, for those are the rays that emanate from the sun and carry the heat.

Our purpose in this book is two-fold: to highlight for teachers the pivotal role that nonverbal behavior plays in TL communication by presenting research tenets on nonverbal behavior that will inform their classroom decisions; and to offer specific techniques that will allow language learners to capitalize on all of the bodily, vocal and spatial means at their disposal while deliberating on their own personal identities and the degree to which they desire to participate in the TL culture. As Wylie (1977: vii) said, 'We communicate not only with our voices but our entire bodies and the space around them.' In this book, we consider how language learners – of any language – can enhance their communicative, affective and cognitive competence by tapping into the power of their kinesic behavior (including gesture, posture, facial expression and eye behavior), prosody (e.g. vocal cues) and proxemics (e.g. the use of space).

The book is divided into three parts. The first provides background information on nonverbal behavior, its role in TL communicative, affective and cognitive competencies, and considers the challenges and successes inherent in attempting to guide TL learners on their journeys be more effective nonverbal communicators. Such challenges lie not only in the cultural specificity of nonverbal cues, but also because of their unintentional, ambiguous, continuous and multi-channeled nature. We also include in this section some general pedagogical guidelines to increase learners' encoding and decoding skill in any of the codes that teachers might want to consider.

In Part 2, we present each of the selected nonverbal codes (gesture, posture, facial expression, eye behavior, prosody and proxemics) broken down into their communicative, affective and cognitive functions. We chose these particular codes because they influence TL communication and contain elements over which teachers might have some control and exert some influence. For example, teachers might explicitly instruct learners on gesture so to enhance their TL communication by reducing ambiguity, raise their affect by increasing interlocutors' intersubjectivity and improve their cognition by engaging more senses. However, we left out a few nonverbal codes that some researchers consider important to the overall communication process, such as physical attractiveness and body artifacts, because we found them of less value for our language learning and teaching purposes. This does not mean, however, that they are not important in the communication process, but that they are not as amenable to change in the classroom context. At the conclusion of each research tenet, we provide the number(s) of the corresponding technique(s) that tap into the information in the tenet and which are found in the last section.

Part 3 contains the classroom techniques from among which teachers may choose. They are categorized by the competency they seek to enhance: communicative, affective and cognitive. Because more than one code is typically involved in improving a particular competency, this organization allows us to tap into various codes and show how they work together toward the same purpose. For example, to increase learners' communicative discourse competency via improved turn-taking mechanisms, we might capitalize on a combination of codes including gesture, posture, facial expression, eye behavior and vocal cues which function in tandem to maintain, deny, yield or request a speaking turn.

One important element to keep in mind is that, although nonverbal communication influences all human interaction, it may in some cases be even more essential in TL interactions: 'The fact that at least one communicator is working in a second language means the verbal content may not be as clear as it would be in an intracultural interaction. Consequently, the reliance on nonverbal communication may be even greater than normal' (Singelis, 1994: 275). With this increased need in mind, we turn our attention to definitions of nonverbal communication, its communicative, affective and cognitive TL functions, the challenges of teaching it, and some general guidelines for improving learners' decoding and encoding skills.

Background on Nonverbal Behavior, its Teachability and General Training Recommendations

This section begins with a broad definition of what we mean when we say, 'nonverbal communication.' We provide explanations concerning how nonverbal behavior impacts communication, affect and cognition. Next, we address the complexities of training learners in capitalizing on their bodies and voices for increased TL competence – including the complications that socio-cultural elements engender. Finally, we end this section by providing several general guidelines for preparing learners for the activities that we present in Part 3.

Definitions

'Nonverbal behavior is any of a wide variety of human behaviors that also have the potential for forming communicative messages. Such nonverbal behavior becomes communication if another person interprets it as a message and attributes meaning' (Richmond et al., 2012: 6). It is possible that a specific action might be communicative in one context and not in another. If a language learner extends his arm above his head in a stretching motion to symbolize his willingness to volunteer, it would be considered nonverbal communication. If that same motion was performed to relieve himself of a muscle cramp, this behavior is not communicative because there is no meaning being communicated to another person.

Although many nonverbal experts limit their definitions to that which involves an exchange between people, we propose widening those parameters to include the intra personal function of nonverbal behavior. In this scenario, the nonverbal behavior accompanying an individual's 'private speech' or 'self-talk' would be considered communication, albeit self-directed. For example, language learners might add a kinesics element, such as a gesture, to accompany hearing, seeing and writing a new vocabulary word to enhance their retention and later retrieval of the lexical item. Our comprehensive definition allows us to discuss the full array of communicative, affective and cognitive functions of nonlinguistic and paralinguistic codes, such as kinesics (including gesture, posture, facial expression and eye behavior), prosodic vocal features and space that language teachers and learners can capitalize on to increase communicative, affective and cognitive competence.

Nonverbal Behavior and Communicative Competence

At one time, successful language learning was defined by how accurately learners could formulate their utterances and how fully they could comprehend the messages of others. The main goal was grammaticality; the focus was on form. With the advent of more communicative approaches to language pedagogy, teachers and researchers understood that the ability to say the right thing at the proper time to the appropriate people was just as important as placing words in their correct syntactic order, conjugating verbs well and pronouncing correct phonemes. With additional dimensions of success now considered, ideas of achievement or successful learning shifted from a focus on grammaticality toward incorporating sociolinguistic, strategic and discourse competencies. In judging success, communication and meaning did not supplant accuracy, but rather were added to it. Today, this broader notion of communicative competency inspires teachers to cultivate their learners' conversational management, cultural appropriateness and self-regulated approaches to learning as well as to facilitate learners' accurate knowledge and use of TL linguistic codes (Canale, 1983; Canale & Swain, 1980). Some of the potential benefits of an expanded framework can be summarized as follows:

• Self-regulated and strategic learners who purposefully and proactively take control of their learning maximize their outcomes and are more autonomous.

• Conversationally savvy learners who seamlessly exchange roles and organize cohesive discourse keep the stream of conversation flowing and create a wide range of meanings.

• Culturally competent learners who vary their speech and behavior in accordance with the social and cultural context interact effectively with individuals from a variety of backgrounds.

• Grammatically proficient learners who understand and use the linguistic codes of their TL accurately have fewer communication breakdowns than their less accurate counterparts (Scarcella & Oxford, 1992).

Communicatively speaking, in a social framework, nonverbal and verbal channels are inextricably linked. Although we might differentiate nonverbal communication from verbal, during face-to-face interaction the various channels are seamlessly connected and exquisitely well coordinated in time. When we communicate, we do not separate meaning into channels very often; a big red mental flag is raised when we find different meaning in verbal and nonverbal communication. Most often, the verbal and the nonverbal messages interact to become integrated into one communicative event (DeVito & Hecht, 1990). For example, when a teacher corrects Angelina's error in her ESL class, Angela will probably not separate the teacher's smile and encouraging voice from her words, 'Did you mean to say, "I walk to school" or "I walks to school?"' Voice, smile and words should act in harmony to create an overall positive impression. According to Arndt and Janney (1987: 92), 'the idea that there are clear boundaries between verbal and nonverbal communication and that it is possible to distinguish sharply between linguistic and nonlinguistic features of conversational events is rooted more in our own logical and methodological assumptions than in the psychological realities of face-to-face communication.' The authors suggest that people create meaning from the entirety of the communicative event, including the verbal, paraverbal (vocal behavior) and nonverbal, rather than adding them up as isolated signs.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Optimizing Language Learners' Nonverbal Behavior by Tammy Gregersen, Peter D. MacIntyre. Copyright © 2017 Tammy Gregersen and Peter D. MacIntyre. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1783097353
• ISBN 13: 9781783097357
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400