Nonverbal behavior and its implications

This paper attempts to examine several significant dimensions of nonverbal communication in the social interaction. These dimensions so often thought of as "hidden" can be classified into such three categories as relation markers illustrating certain relations between speakers and hearers, structure-markers demonstrating the structure of the human interaction and content-markers marking the given content in question. It is estimated that nonverbal communication most often carry as much as 65 percent of the social meaning while verbal communication only around 35. So much information is communicated nonverbally in the social context that often the verbal aspect is negligible. Here how the interaction should start and proceed with the aid of bodily movements, facial expressions, gestures, eye-contact and some other communicative media or channels makes great sense. To make it concrete, illustrative and interesting, some examples are to be given so as to show how nonverbal communication functions in some social contexts such as interpersonal contact and classroom interaction and serves as an indispensable and voluntary substitute for the verbal component. The implication lies in that the outcome of the investigation of the nonverbal communication can therefore bring some enlightment to the ESL (English As a Second Language) teachers, who are possible to gain the insight into the psychological activities of the ESL learners and then come to efficiently use the unnoticed strategies of increasing the excellence of classroom performance on the part of those people. It also helps the ESL instructors to prepare the advanced learners, such as science graduates, fully for the better operation in their future career.