TOPIC 2. COMMUNICATION IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION. EXTRALINGUISTIC STRATEGIES: NON-VERBAL RESPONSES TO MESSAGES IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Where the non-verbal lives in the legal and curricular framework of the area
3. Verbal communication in the English class: from teacher talk to student talk
4. Non-verbal communication: kinesics, proxemics, chronemics, and paralinguistics
5. Mehrabian and the 7-38-55 rule: scope, misconceptions, and true meaning
6. Ekman and the basic universal emotions
7. Extralinguistic strategies in the EFL classroom: mime, gestures, eye contact, intonation, silence
8. Total Physical Response (TPR) by James Asher: a paradigmatic method
9. Didactic application across Primary cycles
10. Hall, Ekman, and Asher: three keys to understanding non-verbal communication in EFL
11. Conclusion
12. Bibliography and legislative references

1. INTRODUCTION

Any teacher who has set foot in a Primary English classroom knows that teaching a foreign language is not merely a matter of words. A face that lights up when an instruction is understood, a finger pointing to the correct flashcard, an eloquent silence when students do not dare to speak, a hand raised in hesitation, a smile that rewards the courage of a first attempt: all of this is communication, and all of it takes place in the EFL classroom minute by minute. The foreign language is the content of the class, but communication — in its broad sense, verbal and non-verbal — is the medium that makes it possible.

This topic examines in depth that dual dimension of communication in the English classroom. What do we mean by verbal communication and non-verbal communication, and how do they intertwine in the day-to-day reality of the classroom? What do disciplines such as the proxemics and chronemics of Edward T. Hall or the kinesics systematised by Ray Birdwhistell contribute? What does the famous 7-38-55 rule of Albert Mehrabian actually say, and why has it been misunderstood for decades? What are the extralinguistic strategies that Primary students deploy to compensate for linguistic gaps, and how can the teacher develop them? Why does Total Physical Response (TPR) by James Asher remain, almost fifty years after its formulation, an indispensable tool in any Primary EFL classroom?

The perspective adopted combines three viewpoints. The scientific viewpoint, anchored in the classical authors of the anthropology of communication and emotional psychology: Hall, Birdwhistell, Mehrabian, Ekman. The legal viewpoint, which situates the content within the Ley Orgánica 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre (LOMLOE), the Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, the Decreto 38/2022, de 29 de septiembre, which establishes the organisation and curriculum of Primary Education in Castilla y León, and the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) with its 2020 Companion Volume. And the didactic viewpoint, which translates theory into concrete proposals for the three Primary cycles. A teacher who consciously understands and manages non-verbal communication in the classroom multiplies the effectiveness of their teaching and reduces the linguistic anxiety of their pupils — two effects that are especially valuable in the learning of a foreign language and, above all, in the secciones bilingües regulated by the Orden EDU/6/2006, where English is also the medium of instruction for non-linguistic areas.

2. WHERE THE NON-VERBAL LIVES IN THE LEGAL AND CURRICULAR FRAMEWORK OF THE AREA

Communication, verbal and non-verbal, is not a marginal matter in the English curriculum: it is one of its pillars. And yet a candidate who claims so is usually asked to be precise, because the curriculum never devotes a heading to «non-verbal communication». It is worth knowing exactly where it does appear. It appears, first, inside plurilingual competence, understood as the ability to use different languages appropriately and effectively — and appropriateness is largely a non-verbal matter. It appears, second, distributed across the specific competences of the area: we understand better when speakers accompany their words with gestures and intonation; we produce better when we deploy paralinguistic resources; we interact better when we respect the non-verbal norms of the exchange; and we mediate better when we correctly interpret the emotional signals of our interlocutors. And it appears, third and most explicitly, in the basic knowledge of the area, under the heading of communicative strategies, where the curriculum lists the extralinguistic and paralinguistic resources — gesture, mime, images, sounds, intonation — that allow a speaker to keep a conversation alive when words run out.

That last point deserves emphasis because it changes how the non-verbal should be treated in a lesson plan. Gesture and intonation are not a concession made to young learners while they cannot yet speak, to be withdrawn once they can: they are strategic content in their own right, taught, practised and assessed like any other. A pupil who shrugs, points and mimes to get their meaning across when they lack the word is not failing at English — they are deploying precisely the strategy the curriculum asks them to acquire, and the assessment criteria of interaction reward it. The consequence for assessment is worth stating too: whenever we assess interaction, we are already assessing non-verbal behaviour, whether or not we have made it explicit in our rubric. Making it explicit is the difference between assessing what we intend to assess and assessing it by accident.

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), published by the Council of Europe in 2001, explicitly devotes a section to non-verbal communication within communicative language activities, subdividing it into four main categories: gestures and actions that accompany speech (deictic, descriptive, symbolic), paralinguistic body language (gestural language with conventional meaning, facial expressions, postures, eye contact), use of extralinguistic elements (non-phonological sounds such as shh, tsk, hum) and prosodic features (vocal qualities, rhythm, volume). The Companion Volume with New Descriptors (2018/2020) broadens this focus with new specific descriptors for mediation, in which non-verbal communication is decisive: reading the interlocutor's face, adjusting language to context, interpreting culturally marked gestures.

Two further considerations frame this content and both belong in the topic. The first concerns the child's protection, a duty of care that the Ley Orgánica 8/2021, de 4 de junio, de protección integral a la infancia y la adolescencia frente a la violencia places on every teacher: affective, respectful communication with pupils translates, in the EFL classroom, into particular attention to the teacher's body language — tone, gaze, distance — as a factor of emotional safety, and into the awareness that the same gesture can reassure one child and unsettle another. The second concerns coexistence: communicative quality is one of the pillars on which the school's plan de convivencia rests — the document made compulsory in Castilla y León by the Decreto 51/2007, de 17 de mayo, por el que se regulan los derechos y deberes de los alumnos y la participación y los compromisos de las familias en el proceso educativo, y se establecen las normas de convivencia y disciplina en los Centros Educativos de Castilla y León and by the Orden EDU/1921/2007, de 27 de noviembre —, since most classroom conflict is not caused by what was said but by how it was said. To these may be added the European framework of key competences, which includes within personal, social and learning-to-learn competence the ability to manage one's own communication in diverse contexts — a dimension in which the non-verbal carries as much weight as the verbal, or more.

The conceptual framework of this topic rests on several terms that must be clarified. Verbal communication is communication that uses articulated language, oral or written, as its primary code: words, sentences, texts. Non-verbal communication encompasses all communicative exchange, intentional or unintentional, that takes place through channels other than articulated language: gestures, postures, facial expressions, eye contact, distances, silences, rhythm, clothing. Extralinguistic strategies are non-verbal resources that the speaker deliberately deploys to sustain, supplement, replace, or repair verbal communication, particularly when verbal resources are insufficient — as happens constantly in a foreign language classroom. Handling these terms with clarity allows candidates to move confidently through the classical debates of the discipline and translate them into classroom decisions.

That map has an address in the law, and a candidate should be able to give it. The Ley Orgánica 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre, por la que se modifica la Ley Orgánica 2/2006, de 3 de mayo, de Educación (LOMLOE) and the Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, por el que se establecen la ordenación y las enseñanzas mínimas de la Educación Primaria set the communicative and action-oriented approach of the area. In Castilla y León — a Community with no education act of its own, where the tier below the Ley Orgánica 14/2007, de 30 de noviembre, de reforma del Estatuto de Autonomía de Castilla y León is occupied directly by decrees — that common core is developed by the Decreto 38/2022, de 29 de septiembre, por el que se establece la ordenación y el currículo de la educación primaria en la Comunidad de Castilla y León: Lengua Extranjera is one of the eight areas taught in every year of the stage (art. 15.1.g), with sixteen weekly hours across the stage in the annex V timetable, which is of obligatory compliance (art. 17); its specific competences, assessment criteria and basic knowledge — among them the estrategias comunicativas where the extralinguistic and paralinguistic resources live — are gathered in annex III (art. 9), and the orientations for designing the learning situations that put them to work, in annex II.C (art. 14). Assessment is criterial (art. 19 of the decree, and art. 2.2 of the Orden EDU/423/2024, de 9 de mayo, por la que se desarrolla la evaluación y la promoción en la Educación Primaria en la Comunidad de Castilla y León), which is exactly what makes the previous paragraph operative: if the criterion names gesture, intonation or turn-taking, that behaviour is being assessed, and the oral tests that art. 3.3 of that order requires in every area in the last two years of the stage are the natural place to observe it.

Two features of this Community give the non-verbal an added weight. The first is its double bilingual network: the secciones bilingües of the Orden EDU/6/2006, de 4 de enero, por la que se regula la creación de secciones bilingües en centros sostenidos con fondos públicos de la Comunidad de Castilla y León — a norm that is never quoted on its own, because the Orden EDU/1847/2007, de 19 de noviembre reversed its original ban on more than one language per school and the Orden EDU/392/2012, de 30 de mayo raised the requirement for teachers of non-linguistic areas to a documented B2 or above of the CEFR (art. 11.2) — and the secciones lingüísticas of the MEC–British Council programme created by the Orden EDU/1141/2005, de 2 de septiembre, whose integrated curriculum starts at the age of three. Where between two and three non-linguistic disciplines are taught in English, without exceeding half of the pupils' timetable (art. 2.2 of the Orden EDU/6/2006), gesture, mime, visual support and prosody cease to be an aid for beginners and become the ordinary machinery of comprehensible input in Science or in Arts. The second is the auxiliar de conversación regulated by the Orden EDU/1134/2011, de 6 de septiembre, por la que se regula la actividad de los auxiliares de conversación seleccionados por el Ministerio de Educación en centros educativos de la Comunidad de Castilla y León: twelve weekly hours of contact with a speaker who brings the paralinguistic and cultural conventions of their own country into the classroom, always «acompañados siempre en el aula» by the teacher they support and never responsible for supervising or assessing pupils (art. 2.2).

Figure 1. Verbal, non-verbal and paralinguistic channels, and where extralinguistic strategies sit.

3. VERBAL COMMUNICATION IN THE ENGLISH CLASS: FROM TEACHER TALK TO STUDENT TALK

Although the focus of this topic is non-verbal communication, it would be a mistake to address it without first characterising verbal communication in the English class, because the two support each other. Verbal communication in the EFL classroom has distinctive features that set it apart both from everyday conversation and from teaching in the mother tongue.

The first feature is initial asymmetry: at the start of the stage, the teacher has a far greater command of English than the students. This makes the teacher's speech — the so-called teacher talk — the primary source of comprehensible input, in the sense proposed by Stephen Krashen in his input hypothesis (1985). Krashen posits that second language acquisition occurs when the learner receives input slightly above their current level (i+1), comprehensible thanks to context and extralinguistic support. Effective teacher talk in Primary is therefore speech that is simplified but not infantilising, clear in pronunciation, rich in repetitions and reformulations, supported by gestures, mime, and objects, and adjusted to the group's level. It is speech carefully designed to be understood without constant recourse to translation.

The second feature is the directionality of speech. Jeremy Harmer, in The Practice of English Language Teaching, distinguishes three main patterns of classroom speech: teacher–whole class (instructions, explanations, content presentation), teacher–individual student (individual questions, corrections), and student–student (pair or group work, pair work and group work). The balance between these three patterns is one of the indicators of methodological quality: a class in which the teacher speaks 80% of the time, however impeccable their English, is not a good English lesson.

The third feature is the pedagogical function of speech. H.D. Brown, in Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, distinguishes between speech used to convey content, speech used to manage the classroom (instructions, attention-calling, transitions), and speech used to give feedback (praise, corrections, suggestions). One of the key recommendations in contemporary EFL methodology is that classroom management language should be maintained systematically in English from the first cycle: «Sit down, please», «Open your books», «Listen carefully», «Well done!». In this way, English ceases to be merely an object of study and becomes a real instrument of communication — a feature that is intensified wherever other subjects are taught in English, which requires the teacher to maintain fluent and consistent classroom language all day long.

The fourth feature is interaction. The shift from teacher talk to student talk requires specific strategies. Open questions (Why do you think...?) are more communicative than closed ones (Is it red or blue?), though the latter have their place in the first cycle. Techniques such as think-pair-share, information gap activities, role-plays, and task-based learning as described by N. S. Prabhu and developed by Jane Willis in A Framework for Task-Based Learning (1996) maximise the time students spend producing language. A classic third-cycle information gap activity: two students each have different maps with complementary information about a theme park and must ask each other questions to complete them. The task is only resolved by speaking English.

The fifth feature is correction. Rod Ellis and other second language acquisition theorists distinguish between explicit correction (correcting directly), recasts (reformulating without marking the error), clarification requests («Sorry, what?»), metalinguistic feedback («Past tense, please»), elicitation («Yesterday I... ?»), and repetition (repeating the error with rising intonation). In Primary, recasts and clarification requests tend to work better than explicit correction, which can raise the affective filter — also Krashen's concept — and block production.

Figure 2. Six ways of correcting the same error, ordered from implicit to explicit, and the ones that suit Primary.

With verbal classroom speech characterised, we can now address what occurs simultaneously on the non-verbal channels.

4. NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION: KINESICS, PROXEMICS, CHRONEMICS, AND PARALINGUISTICS

Non-verbal communication is traditionally structured into four main dimensions, each with its own academic discipline and key authors that the candidate must know.

Kinesics studies body movements with communicative value: gestures, facial expressions, posture, gaze. The term was coined by the American anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell in Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication (1970), where he argued — in a contested but influential claim — that in a face-to-face conversation only between 30% and 35% of meaning is conveyed by words. Birdwhistell distinguishes several types of gesture: emblems (gestures with conventional meaning, such as thumbs up for OK), illustrators (accompanying and supporting speech, such as showing the size of something), regulators (organising interaction, such as nodding to signal continued listening), affect displays (expressing emotion, such as a smile), and adaptors (unconscious gestures that channel tension, such as touching one's hair). This typology, taken up and extended by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior (1969), is enormously useful for the EFL classroom: cultural emblems are a frequent source of intercultural misunderstanding, illustrators are the primary tool for supporting teacher talk, and regulators teach us to read the group's attentiveness.

Proxemics studies the communicative use of space: the distances we maintain from interlocutors and the spatial organisation of encounters. The discipline was founded by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall in The Silent Language (1959) and developed in The Hidden Dimension (1966). Hall distinguished four zones of interpersonal distance in the North American culture of his time: the intimate zone (0–45 cm, for very close individuals), the personal zone (45–120 cm, conversations between acquaintances), the social zone (120–360 cm, formal or professional interactions), and the public zone (more than 360 cm, lectures, presentations). Hall further stressed that these distances are culturally variable: what in Mediterranean cultures is considered friendly closeness may feel like an invasion of personal space in Anglo-Saxon or Nordic cultures. In the EFL classroom this dimension has immediate applications: how desks are arranged (in rows, in a U-shape, in groups), where the teacher stands in relation to the students, what distance is adopted when giving individual feedback, and how students are positioned in a role-play.

Figure 3. Hall's four proxemic zones and what each distance is used for in the classroom.

Chronemics studies the communicative use of time. Hall pioneered this field as well. He distinguished between monochronic cultures (which organise time linearly, one thing at a time, punctual appointments, strict schedules, typical of northern Europe and the United States) and polychronic cultures (which organise time more flexibly, several things at once, approximate appointments, typical of the Mediterranean, Latin America, and the Middle East). In the classroom, chronemics is reflected in aspects as everyday as the pace of the session, the waiting time after a question — the so-called wait time, about which Mary Budd Rowe demonstrated in the 1970s that extending it from one second to three dramatically improves the quality of students' responses — the duration of activities, pedagogical silences, and transitions. A teacher who respects wait time opens space for students to think in English; one who does not perpetuates dependence on teacher talk.

Paralinguistics studies the vocal qualities that accompany speech and modify or complement its meaning: tone, volume, rhythm, speed, intonation, pauses, non-phonological sounds (shh, uh-huh, hmm). Although some authors classify it as an intermediate category between the verbal and the non-verbal, its value in the EFL classroom is enormous. The same word, yes, can express enthusiasm, doubt, scepticism, exasperation, or surprise simply by changing the tone. English intonation, moreover, carries crucial grammatical and pragmatic information: the rising contour at the end of a yes/no question, the falling contour in statements, marked intonation to emphasise contrast or new information. Working on paralinguistics from the first cycle — through singing, role-playing, imitating voices — prevents the monotone intonation problems that many Spanish speakers carry throughout their lives.

To these four classical dimensions a fifth is commonly added today: haptics, the study of communicative touch (handshakes, pats on the back, hugs). In the Primary classroom, haptics raises delicate issues that must be handled with professional sensitivity: physical contact with pupils has to be respectful, purposeful and always oriented towards the child's wellbeing, and the teacher should know that what is affectionate in one family culture may be intrusive in another.

5. MEHRABIAN AND THE 7-38-55 RULE: SCOPE, MISCONCEPTIONS, AND TRUE MEANING

Probably no figure has been so widely repeated and so widely misunderstood in the field of non-verbal communication as the 7-38-55 rule of the Iranian-American psychologist Albert Mehrabian. The figure circulates on the internet, in popular books, and even in public speaking manuals in this simplified version: «in communication, only 7% of information is conveyed by the words, 38% by the tone of voice, and 55% by body language». This reading is, frankly, false. And candidates should know how to explain why, because demonstrating rigour on this point distinguishes the well-prepared candidate.

Mehrabian's original research, published in two articles in 1967 and later compiled in Silent Messages (1971), addressed a far more restricted problem: situations in which a speaker communicates feelings and attitudes and there is incongruence between the verbal and the non-verbal message. In those specific cases — and only in those — receivers interpret the message by relying 7% on what is said, 38% on the tone of voice, and 55% on the facial expression. For example, if someone with an angry face and a sharp tone says «I'm absolutely fine, thank you», the listener will conclude that the person is not fine; the words carry little weight, and the tone and face carry a great deal.

Mehrabian himself repeatedly complained about the abusive generalisation of his formula. In subsequent interviews he clarified that his figures were never intended to describe all human communication, but exclusively the communication of attitudes and feelings in situations of inconsistency. Applying them to a technical discourse, a maths lesson, or a grammatical explanation is absurd: if only 7% of content in an English class came from words, we would not be teaching English but mime.

Figure 4. The 7-38-55 rule: the narrow case it describes and the cases it does not.

What are we left with for the EFL classroom? Three honest lessons, without the exaggerations found on the internet.

First: when the teacher communicates emotions and attitudes — enthusiasm for a story, satisfaction at good work, firmness in the face of a broken rule, patience with an error — non-verbal language carries far more weight than words. Saying «Very good!» with a weary expression and a monotone voice conveys the opposite message. The coherence between verbal and non-verbal communication is therefore an everyday professional requirement.

Second: when Primary students, especially in the early years, receive a verbal message in English they do not yet fully understand, they rely heavily on the teacher's non-verbal language to decode it. That is why teacher talk accompanied by clear gestures, expressive facial cues, and marked intonation is comprehensible well beyond the group's actual lexical level. Krashen was making the same point when he spoke of comprehensible input supported by extralinguistic context. This lesson is particularly relevant in bilingual settings, where pupils receive conceptual content (science, art, physical education) in a language they have not yet mastered.

Third: when students attempt to produce in English without yet having all the verbal resources at their disposal, they make intensive use of non-verbal resources to make themselves understood. Encouraging them to do so — rather than letting them become frustrated — is one of the keys to an EFL classroom that is respectful of learning rhythms. This connects directly to the notion of extralinguistic strategy addressed in the following section.

In summary, the 7-38-55 rule should not be used as a mantra or a magic figure. It must be understood in context: a bounded description of how affective messages are interpreted when what is said and what is shown contradict each other. Citing it with this qualification demonstrates academic rigour and intellectual honesty.

6. EKMAN AND THE BASIC UNIVERSAL EMOTIONS

Whereas Mehrabian studied the incongruence between the verbal and the non-verbal, Paul Ekman, an American psychologist, dedicated his career to another essential question: are emotional expressions universal or culturally determined? His answer, set out in a long series of works from the 1960s onwards and synthesised in Emotions Revealed (2003), is that there is a small set of basic universal emotions whose facial expression is recognisable by human beings from any culture, including isolated cultures with no previous contact with Western culture, as he demonstrated in his pioneering studies with the Fore people of Papua New Guinea.

Ekman originally identified six basic universal emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. In later work he incorporated contempt as a seventh emotion and opened the door to other secondary emotions that are culturally modulated. For each basic emotion he described a characteristic facial pattern, based on the combination of movements of specific muscles. This systematisation gave rise to the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a tool developed by Ekman and Friesen in 1978 that decomposes any facial expression into Action Units (AUs): for example, a genuine smile — the so-called Duchenne smile, named after the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne — combines AU 6 (raising of the cheeks and wrinkling at the outer corners of the eyes) with AU 12 (raising of the lip corners), whilst a social smile may activate only AU 12 without AU 6, making it less sincere and recognisable as such by most observers.

Figure 5. Ekman: the basic universal emotions, the Duchenne smile against the social one, and display rules.

Ekman's contribution has three direct implications for the Primary EFL classroom.

First implication: the universality of basic emotions means that the teacher can work on emotions in English from the first cycle using facial images that any child, regardless of their mother tongue, will recognise. A classic sequence in Year 1 or Year 2 of Primary is to teach happy, sad, angry, scared, surprised, disgusted by showing flashcards of faces expressing each emotion. Students immediately connect the English word with an emotional meaning they have known since infancy. This is comprehensible input in its purest form.

Second implication: although basic expressions are universal, the cultural norms governing when and how to display them — what Ekman called display rules — are culturally specific. In traditional Anglo-Saxon cultures, public emotional control is stricter than in Mediterranean cultures; in Asian cultures, openly displaying anger may be considered a serious breach of courtesy. Working on these differences in the third cycle, in relation to English-speaking countries, introduces students to the intercultural dimension without resorting to stereotypes.

Third implication: a teacher who can read students' facial expressions has a constant and reliable source of information about the group's comprehension, interest, frustration, or tiredness. A distant gaze, a furrowed brow, a conspiratorial smile, or a stifled sigh say more about classroom dynamics than any formal assessment. This connects directly to formative assessment and to systematic observation, which the curriculum identifies as the privileged assessment tools of the stage.

One final note: the most recent research in emotional psychology — especially that of Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made (2017) — has nuanced Ekman's universalism, arguing that emotions are culturally constructed from a shared biological base. The debate remains open and the honest candidate should be aware of it. But the didactic utility of basic emotions as a gateway to emotional vocabulary in English remains enormous.

7. EXTRALINGUISTIC STRATEGIES IN THE EFL CLASSROOM: MIME, GESTURES, EYE CONTACT, INTONATION, SILENCE

We arrive at the pedagogical heart of this topic: the extralinguistic strategies that teachers and students deploy in the EFL classroom to sustain, supplement, or repair communication. The CEFR explicitly includes them as an essential component of strategic competence, and the curriculum lists them among the basic knowledge of the area. Primary students, especially in the first and second cycles, do not yet have a sufficient linguistic repertoire to communicate everything they wish to communicate; extralinguistic strategies are their lifeline.

Mime. Mime is the oldest and most effective communicative resource when words are lacking. Students can mime actions (running, sleeping, eating, drinking), objects (a book, a ball, a guitar), and emotions (happiness, fear, surprise). Games such as Mime the action, Charades, or Guess the animal turn mime into an engine of lexical learning. The teacher must model it first with generosity: an English teacher who puts their whole body into a story encourages students to do the same when their own turn comes.

Gestures. There are universal gestures (pointing, nodding, shaking one's head) and culturally marked gestures (thumbs up, the V sign, the circle formed by thumb and index finger). Some gestures change meaning across cultures: the circle formed with thumb and index finger means OK in much of the Anglo-Saxon world but is offensive in Brazil, Turkey, or Greece. Working on these cultural gestures in the third cycle, as part of a unit on English-speaking countries, awakens intercultural sensitivity. Furthermore, students will spontaneously use gestures to point to what they do not know how to name («That, that thing... blue!»); the teacher should value this resource as a valid strategy, not as a surrender to the language.

Eye contact. Eye contact serves several functions in the classroom: it regulates turn-taking, signals attention and interest, expresses closeness and trust, and gives confidence to shy students. In Anglo-Saxon cultures, maintaining eye contact with the interlocutor is associated with sincerity and trust; in other cultures, particularly some Asian cultures or in relation to authority figures, avoiding it is a sign of respect. The teacher must be aware of these variations, especially with students who have recently arrived from other cultural backgrounds. In classroom mechanics, eye contact helps capture attention before giving an instruction, to sustain a conversation with an individual student without losing sight of the group, and to encourage those who need prompting to speak.

Intonation. As already noted, English intonation conveys grammatical information (question, statement), pragmatic information (emphasis, contrast, irony), and affective information (interest, surprise, doubt). Spanish Primary students tend towards monotone intonation in English because they transfer the patterns of Castilian, which has a narrower tonal range. Working on intonation from the first cycle — imitating the voices of story characters, exaggerating questions and exclamations, singing songs with marked prosody — prevents this classic problem. A useful technique is backchain drilling: breaking a long sentence apart from the end backwards, maintaining the intonation, and building it up progressively: «...the park» — «to the park» — «I'm going to the park».

Silence. Silence is communicative. In the classroom it can express concentration, doubt, fear, respect, or exasperation. Mary Budd Rowe demonstrated in the 1970s that extending wait time — the silence between a question and the expected response — from one second to three or more dramatically improves both the quantity and the quality of students' contributions, especially those of shy students or students with lower linguistic competence. In the EFL classroom this principle is golden: if the teacher waits two or three extra seconds before rephrasing in Spanish or answering themselves, they give students space to process the English. On the other hand, the so-called silent period described by Krashen is a natural phenomenon in foreign language acquisition: many children, especially in the first cycle, go through weeks or months in which they understand English but do not produce it. Forcing production during that period can increase anxiety and block learning. Students' silence, far from being an absence of learning, is usually a sign that learning is taking place.

To these five strategies — mime, gestures, eye contact, intonation, silence — the CEFR adds others such as distance (management of proxemics), rhythm and pace (chronemics), and prosodic features (volume, intonation, emphasis). The common thread is that a foreign language is not learnt in a vacuum: it is learnt in a body, with a body, and through a body that communicates before, during, and after words.

Figure 6. The five extralinguistic strategies, each read twice: as teacher input and as pupil strategy.

8. TOTAL PHYSICAL RESPONSE (TPR) BY JAMES ASHER: A PARADIGMATIC METHOD

If non-verbal communication is central to the EFL classroom, no method illustrates this better than Total Physical Response (TPR), developed by the American psychologist James Asher and systematised in Learning Another Language Through Actions (1977). TPR is not merely one technique among others: it is a comprehensive vision of language learning that places the body as the essential mediator of linguistic input.

Asher's central hypothesis is that the learning of a second language reproduces, as far as possible, the process of mother tongue acquisition by infants. Infants, before speaking, comprehend for months; they do so because their parents and carers accompany words with physical actions (pointing, showing, giving, taking away, moving). The infant connects sounds with movements, gestures, and objects, and thereby builds a robust receptive repertoire that later enables production. Asher argued that something equivalent must happen in the EFL classroom: students must listen and obey instructions in English accompanied by physical action before they begin to produce. This is known as the comprehension before production phase.

TPR methodology is realised in sessions where the teacher gives instructions in English — simple imperatives at first (Stand up. Sit down. Touch your nose. Touch your head. Open the door. Close your book) — and models the action with their body. Students respond physically without verbalising anything. Progressively, the instructions become more complex (Walk to the door, open it, look outside and close it again) and characters, places, emotions, and situations are incorporated. A point arrives at which students, spontaneously, begin giving instructions to their classmates, and production begins. TPR is therefore particularly powerful in the first cycle of Primary.

Figure 7. TPR step by step: from obeying commands to giving them, with the demand for speech held back.

The advantages of TPR are numerous and well documented:

• Reduces the affective filter: students move, play, laugh, and anxiety decreases.
• Generates massive comprehensible input through the word–action connection.
• Activates kinaesthetic memory, which is especially effective in young children.
• Is inclusive: students with linguistic difficulties, newly arrived students, and students with sensory or cognitive disabilities can all participate fully.
• Connects body and language, avoiding the artificial separation that traditional teaching perpetuated.

Its limitations must also be noted honestly: TPR works excellently for actions, objects, and concrete concepts, but loses effectiveness with abstract content (complex feelings, opinions, hypotheses). It should therefore not be understood as the sole method but rather as a methodological phase that is especially useful in the first cycle and as a cross-cutting resource at all levels. It does not substitute oral production either: there must be a progressive transition from comprehension only to real interaction.

In the contemporary EFL classroom, TPR coexists with other methodological approaches — the communicative approach (CLT), task-based learning by Prabhu and Willis, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), the storytelling approach — and is integrated into proposals such as TPR Storytelling, developed by Blaine Ray in the 1990s, which combines TPR principles with storytelling to introduce richer content. The teacher narrates a short, gestured story; students mime, repeat, and anticipate, until the story is incorporated into their active repertoire. Wherever content is taught in English, TPR also becomes a key element of the scaffolding used in subjects such as Natural Science or Arts, where conceptual content demands physical support to be understood.

TPR is, in short, the paradigmatic example of how non-verbal communication can be placed at the centre of an EFL methodology, and of how the body, far from being an accessory to learning, can be its primary driver in the early years.

9. DIDACTIC APPLICATION ACROSS PRIMARY CYCLES

Verbal and non-verbal communication is developed across all three Primary cycles, but with differentiated emphases that candidates should know and be able to articulate before an examining panel.

In the first cycle (Years 1 and 2, ages 6–8), non-verbal communication is the main scaffolding. TPR, already described, occupies a substantial part of sessions. Classroom routines — hello song, weather chart, days of the week — are systematically gestured. Flashcards are accompanied by associated gestures (a lion with a roar and a claw swipe, an elephant with an imaginary trunk). Stories are told with abundant voices, gestures, and mime (storytelling). Games — Simon says, Touch the colour, Animal walks — combine comprehensible input with physical response. Songs with choreography — Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, If You're Happy and You Know It — integrate prosody, vocabulary, and movement. In this cycle, the teacher must also pay particular attention to their own non-verbal language: smile, warm eye contact, modulated voice, wide gestures. Students read the teacher more than they listen to their words.

A concrete example in the first cycle: the Body Parts unit in Year 2. The teacher introduces body parts through a TPR song (Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes). Then plays Simon says (Simon says touch your nose. Simon says touch your ears. Touch your mouth! — no, Simon didn't say!). Afterwards, students dramatise in pairs a doctor examining a patient (role-play) supported by a toy stethoscope: the doctor points to a body part and asks «Does it hurt?», the patient mimes pain and replies «Yes, ow!» or «No, I'm fine». The unit activates kinesics (miming pain), proxemics (doctor close to the patient), paralinguistics (intonation of complaint and reassurance), and basic emotions (pain, relief).

In the second cycle (Years 3 and 4, ages 8–10), non-verbal communication remains important but is balanced with a growing prominence of structured oracy and early writing. Students already have established routines, a broader active vocabulary, and can maintain simple exchanges. The teacher introduces metalinguistic reflection on intonation («Listen: Are you happy? Yes, I am», marking the rising contour of the question), works on prosody through poems and tongue twisters (She sells seashells on the seashore), and explores cultural gestures (High five, thumbs up). Dramatisations become more complex: short sketches with characters, simple costumes, rudimentary sets. Functional role-play — at the restaurant, at the shop, at the doctor's — combines communicative function, specific vocabulary, associated gestures, and intonation.

An example in the second cycle: the Welcome to our school project. Students simulate receiving a group of children from a partner school in London. In pairs, they prepare a guided tour of the school in English: they learn to greet (Hi, nice to meet you. Welcome!) accompanying the phrase with a handshake and a smile, to present (This is our library. We have many books here) gesturing with an open hand, and to say goodbye (Bye! See you tomorrow!) with a wave. Each station of the tour activates a communicative situation with its own verbal and non-verbal norms.

In the third cycle (Years 5 and 6, ages 10–12), students reach level A2 of the CEFR by the end of the stage — and approximately A2+/B1 in the secciones bilingües of the Orden EDU/6/2006. Verbal communication becomes more sophisticated (multi-turn exchanges, narration in the past, expressing opinions, simple hypotheses) and non-verbal communication is worked on more consciously and reflectively. Intercultural mediation activities appear: comparing gestures across different cultures, identifying misunderstandings arising from non-verbal differences, explaining to a newly arrived classmate the non-verbal norms of the Spanish classroom. Prepared oral presentations are developed with explicit attention to prosody, eye contact, body posture, and use of space. Dramatisations become more ambitious: short plays, video projects, podcasts. A brief debate on adapted topics (Are mobile phones good for children?) introduces students to argumentation and the associated gestures (turn-taking, active listening, agreeing, respectfully disagreeing).

Throughout all three cycles, the teacher also attends to classroom diversity. Students with ASD may have specific difficulties in understanding non-verbal communication and pragmatic norms; the teacher must make certain conventions explicit (what a gaze means, what silence means, when it is one's turn to speak) and provide clear visual supports, in keeping with the inclusive approach that the Orden EDU/1152/2010, de 3 de agosto prescribes in Castilla y León for pupils with specific educational support needs, and which art. 25.2 of the Decreto 38/2022 turns into express flexibilisation and methodological alternatives in the teaching and the assessment of the foreign language. Students with hearing difficulties rely heavily on kinesics and lip-reading, which requires the teacher to attend to their position facing the group and their articulation; art. 15.4 of the Decreto 38/2022 further allows a school to incorporate Spanish Sign Language, recognised by the Ley 27/2007, de 23 de octubre, into its provision. Students with dyslexia benefit particularly from the TPR and multisensory approach, which minimises dependence on written language. Newly arrived students who do not yet share the language of instruction find in non-verbal communication their first means of integration: universal gestures, basic emotions, and the warm eye contact of the teacher and classmates serve as their first language. UDL (Universal Design for Learning) encompasses this attention to multiple means of access, expression and engagement — and non-verbal communication is, in itself, one of those means.

Figure 8. What rises and what falls across the three cycles, with the anchor activity of each.

10. HALL, EKMAN, AND ASHER: THREE KEYS TO UNDERSTANDING NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION IN EFL

The journey through the theory and practice of non-verbal communication in the EFL classroom can be synthesised in three contributions that the teacher must be able to articulate with confidence before an examining panel. Each responds to a different question and, together, they offer a complete picture of the phenomenon.

Edward T. Hall (The Silent Language, 1959; The Hidden Dimension, 1966) responds to the question «what non-verbal dimensions does communication have?» by founding two key disciplines — proxemics and chronemics — and opening the way for the systematic study of the silent language that accompanies all human interaction. His distinction between monochronic and polychronic cultures offers teachers a framework for understanding many everyday misunderstandings, particularly with students or families from different cultural backgrounds. His description of interpersonal distances has direct applications for classroom organisation. And his emphasis on the cultural nature of non-verbal communication guards against the ethnocentrism of believing that one's own way of communicating is the only or the natural one. In the EFL classroom, citing Hall justifies decisions such as arranging desks in groups to favour interaction, respecting the personal space of introverted students, and working explicitly on politeness norms in Anglo-Saxon cultures.

Paul Ekman (Emotions Revealed, 2003; Facial Action Coding System, 1978) responds to the question «how do we express what we feel?» by empirically demonstrating the universality of a small set of basic emotions — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and later contempt — and by systematising their facial expression through the FACS. His contribution, though today nuanced by authors such as Lisa Feldman Barrett, remains the foundation of all emotional education and of much of the didactics of affective vocabulary in foreign languages. In the EFL classroom, citing Ekman justifies working on emotions from the first cycle with visual support, linking plurilingual competence with the personal, social, and learning-to-learn competence of the curriculum, and attending consciously to students' non-verbal language as a reliable source of information about their emotional state and their comprehension.

James Asher (Learning Another Language Through Actions, 1977) responds to the question «how does all this translate into a concrete methodology for the classroom?» with Total Physical Response (TPR), a method that places the physical response to linguistic input at the core of learning in the early years. TPR is not only a repertoire of activities: it is a theory of learning that connects the psycholinguistics of development (the priority of comprehension over production, the role of the body in memory), affective psychology (the reduction of anxiety, Krashen's affective filter), and concrete pedagogy (instructions, games, dramatisations). In the EFL classroom, citing Asher justifies the primacy of oracy over writing in the first cycle, the centrality of physical routines in sessions, the systematic use of gestured storytelling, and the integration of the body in any teaching sequence.

Articulating these three contributions — Hall, Ekman, Asher — allows candidates to present to the examining panel a coherent and professional picture of non-verbal communication in EFL: a phenomenon that is culturally modulated (Hall), universally rooted in emotional biology (Ekman), and didactically operationalisable (Asher). That synthesis is complemented by Dell Hymes's SPEAKING model — presented in Topic 1 — and by the descriptors of the CEFR Companion Volume 2020 of the Council of Europe, which explicitly devote attention to non-verbal communication within communicative language activities.

11. CONCLUSION

Understanding the non-verbal dimension of communication is not an academic indulgence for those who teach English in Primary: it is a professional requirement. Students aged six to twelve learn English largely through the body, before they learn it through words. They understand a gesture before a sentence, imitate intonation before conjugating a verb, and remember a gestured song years after they have forgotten the flashcards. A teacher who understands this and translates it into everyday decisions — how they move around the classroom, how they modulate their voice, how they accompany words with gestures, how they respect silence, how they read the group's facial expressions — multiplies the effectiveness of their teaching and dramatically reduces the linguistic anxiety of their students.

The curriculum of the area — annex III of the Decreto 38/2022 —, together with the CEFR and its Companion Volume 2020, enshrines this integral vision of communication. Extralinguistic strategies are specific competences; non-verbal communication appears in the basic knowledge; learning situations require the simultaneous deployment of verbal and non-verbal resources. The communicative conception of language, addressed in Topic 1, is completed here with the awareness that communicating always means communicating also with the body, with tone, with gaze, with space, and with time.

The major contributions reviewed — Hall and proxemics-chronemics, Birdwhistell and kinesics, Mehrabian and his nuanced rule, Ekman and the basic universal emotions, Asher and TPR — are not academic ornaments: they are the theoretical foundation on which a teaching of English that is respectful of how children learn is built. Working on communication in the EFL classroom from this integral perspective means, ultimately, offering students a rich, safe, inclusive, and real-life communicative experience in which English is learnt as all things that matter are learnt: with the whole body, with emotion, and in relation with others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LEGISLATIVE REFERENCES

Legislation

1. Ley Orgánica 2/2006, de 3 de mayo, de Educación. BOE núm. 106, de 4 de mayo de 2006.
2. Ley Orgánica 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre, por la que se modifica la Ley Orgánica 2/2006, de 3 de mayo, de Educación (LOMLOE). BOE núm. 340, de 30 de diciembre de 2020.
3. Ley Orgánica 8/2021, de 4 de junio, de protección integral a la infancia y la adolescencia frente a la violencia. BOE núm. 134, de 5 de junio de 2021.
4. Ley Orgánica 14/2007, de 30 de noviembre, de reforma del Estatuto de Autonomía de Castilla y León. BOE núm. 288, de 1 de diciembre de 2007.
5. Ley 27/2007, de 23 de octubre, por la que se reconocen las lenguas de signos españolas y se regulan los medios de apoyo a la comunicación oral de las personas sordas, con discapacidad auditiva y sordociegas. BOE núm. 255, de 24 de octubre de 2007.
6. Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, por el que se establecen la ordenación y las enseñanzas mínimas de la Educación Primaria. BOE núm. 52, de 2 de marzo de 2022.
7. DECRETO 38/2022, de 29 de septiembre, por el que se establece la ordenación y el currículo de la educación primaria en la Comunidad de Castilla y León. BOCYL núm. 190, de 30 de septiembre de 2022.
8. DECRETO 51/2007, de 17 de mayo, por el que se regulan los derechos y deberes de los alumnos y la participación y los compromisos de las familias en el proceso educativo, y se establecen las normas de convivencia y disciplina en los Centros Educativos de Castilla y León. BOCYL núm. 99, de 23 de mayo de 2007.
9. ORDEN EDU/423/2024, de 9 de mayo, por la que se desarrolla la evaluación y la promoción en la Educación Primaria en la Comunidad de Castilla y León. BOCYL núm. 95, de 17 de mayo de 2024.
10. ORDEN EDU/6/2006, de 4 de enero, por la que se regula la creación de secciones bilingües en centros sostenidos con fondos públicos de la Comunidad de Castilla y León. BOCYL núm. 8, de 12 de enero de 2006. Modificada por la ORDEN EDU/1847/2007, de 19 de noviembre (BOCYL núm. 228, de 23 de noviembre de 2007) y por la ORDEN EDU/392/2012, de 30 de mayo (BOCYL núm. 109, de 8 de junio de 2012), que es la que exige el nivel B2 del MCER al profesorado de áreas no lingüísticas.
11. ORDEN EDU/1141/2005, de 2 de septiembre, por la que se crean secciones lingüísticas de lengua inglesa en colegios públicos de Educación Infantil y Primaria de la Comunidad de Castilla y León. BOCYL núm. 177, de 13 de septiembre de 2005.
12. ORDEN EDU/1134/2011, de 6 de septiembre, por la que se regula la actividad de los auxiliares de conversación seleccionados por el Ministerio de Educación en centros educativos de la Comunidad de Castilla y León. BOCYL núm. 178, de 14 de septiembre de 2011.
13. ORDEN EDU/1152/2010, de 3 de agosto, por la que se regula la respuesta educativa al alumnado con necesidad específica de apoyo educativo escolarizado en el segundo ciclo de Educación Infantil, Educación Primaria, Educación Secundaria Obligatoria, Bachillerato y Enseñanzas de Educación Especial, en los centros docentes de la Comunidad de Castilla y León. BOCYL núm. 156, de 13 de agosto de 2010.
14. ORDEN EDU/1921/2007, de 27 de noviembre, por la que se establecen medidas y actuaciones para la promoción y mejora de la convivencia en los centros educativos de Castilla y León. BOCYL núm. 234, de 3 de diciembre de 2007.

Reference documents and frameworks

1. Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge University Press.
2. Council of Europe (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages — Companion Volume. Council of Europe Publishing.
3. Recommendation of the Council of the European Union of 22 May 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning.
4. United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20 November 1989 (articles 12 and 13).
5. CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, version 2.2. Wakefield, MA.

Bibliographic references

1. Hall, E. T. (1989). El lenguaje silencioso. Alianza. (Original publicado en 1959).
2. Hall, E. T. (1973). La dimensión oculta. Siglo XXI. (Original publicado en 1966).
3. Birdwhistell, R. L. (1970). Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication. University of Pennsylvania Press.
4. Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent Messages. Wadsworth.
5. Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. Times Books.
6. Ekman, P. y Friesen, W. V. (1978). Facial Action Coding System. Consulting Psychologists Press.
7. Asher, J. J. (1977). Learning Another Language Through Actions: The Complete Teacher's Guidebook. Sky Oaks Productions.
8. Brown, H. D. (2014). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (6.ª ed.). Pearson.
9. Harmer, J. (2015). The Practice of English Language Teaching (5.ª ed.). Pearson Longman.
10. Krashen, S. D. (1985). The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. Longman.