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

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Legal and didactic framework for communication in the EFL classroom
3. Verbal communication in the English classroom: 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 by cycle in Primary Education
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 ever stood in an English classroom in Primary Education knows that teaching a foreign language is not merely a matter of words. A face that lights up when it understands an instruction, 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 that is communication, and all of it takes place in the EFL classroom minute by minute. The foreign language is the content of the lesson, but communication — in its broad sense, verbal and non-verbal — is the medium that makes it possible.

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

The perspective adopted combines three viewpoints. The scientific viewpoint, anchored in the classic authors of the anthropology of communication and emotional psychology: Hall, Birdwhistell, Mehrabian, Ekman. The legal viewpoint, which situates the content within the LOMLOE (LO 3/2020), the Real Decreto 157/2022, the Decreto 106/2022, de 5 de agosto, del Consell, and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) with its 2020 Companion Volume. And the didactic viewpoint, which grounds the theory in concrete proposals for the three cycles of Primary Education. The teacher who understands and consciously manages non-verbal communication in the classroom multiplies the effectiveness of their teaching and reduces the linguistic anxiety of their students — two effects that are especially valuable in the learning of a foreign language.

2. LEGAL AND DIDACTIC FRAMEWORK FOR COMMUNICATION IN THE EFL CLASSROOM

Communication, verbal and non-verbal, is not a marginal matter in the English curriculum: it is one of its pillars. The LOMLOE (Ley Orgánica 3/2020, de 29 de diciembre) places among the key competences of the education system the plurilingual competence, defined as the ability to use different languages, appropriately and effectively, for learning and communication. Real Decreto 157/2022, de 1 de marzo, translates this competence into specific competences for the Foreign Language area, centred on comprehension, production, interaction, mediation and plurilingual and intercultural awareness. Non-verbal communication appears transversally across all of them: we understand better when speakers accompany their words with gestures and intonation; we produce better when we mobilise paralinguistic resources; we interact better when we observe the non-verbal norms of exchange; and we mediate better when we correctly interpret the emotional signals of our interlocutors.

In the Comunitat Valenciana, Decreto 106/2022, de 5 de agosto, del Consell, explicitly includes the importance of communicative strategies — including extralinguistic ones — as basic knowledge of the Foreign Language area across all three cycles. The Valencian curriculum emphasises that the learning of English must be rooted in contextualised learning situations in which students simultaneously activate verbal and non-verbal resources to accomplish meaningful communicative tasks. Alongside this decree, Ley 4/2018, de 21 de febrero, of the Generalitat, on plurilingualism in the education system (PEPLI), and the regional decree developing plurilingualism at this stage, frame the teaching of English within a plurilingual and intercultural project in which the non-verbal dimensions of communication (culturally marked gestures, courtesy norms, interpersonal distances) become especially significant.

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

To this specific legislation must be added compulsory cross-curricular references. LOPIVI (LO 8/2021) highlights the importance of affective and respectful communication with children, which in the EFL classroom translates into particular attention to the teacher's body language (tone, gaze, distance) as a factor of emotional protection. The Recommendation of the Council of the European Union of 22 May 2018 on key competences includes, within the 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, or more than, the verbal.

The conceptual framework of the topic rests on certain terms that need to be clarified. Verbal communication is that which uses articulated language, oral or written, as its primary code: words, sentences, texts. Non-verbal communication is any communicative exchange, intentional or unintentional, that occurs 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 mobilises to sustain, supplement, substitute or repair verbal communication, especially when the latter is insufficient, as constantly occurs in the foreign language classroom. Handling these terms with clarity enables the candidate to move confidently through the classical debates of the discipline and to translate them into classroom decisions.

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

Although the focus of this topic is non-verbal communication, it would be a mistake to approach it without first characterising verbal communication in the English classroom, because the two sustain 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 commands far greater English proficiency than the students. This turns the teacher's speech — known as teacher talk — into the principal source of comprehensible input, in the sense proposed by Stephen Krashen in his input hypothesis (1985). Krashen posits that the acquisition of a second language occurs when the learner receives input slightly above their current level (i+1), comprehensible thanks to context and extralinguistic support. Effective teacher talk at Primary level is therefore speech that is simplified but not infantilising, clear in pronunciation, rich in repetitions and reformulations, supported by gestures, mime and objects, and pitched to the level of the group. 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 broad patterns of classroom speech: teacher-to-group (instructions, explanations, presentation of content), teacher-to-student (individual questions, corrections) and student-to-student (pair or group work, pair work and group work). The balance among these three patterns is one of the indicators of methodological quality: a lesson 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, calls to attention, transitions) and speech used to give feedback (praise, corrections, suggestions). One of the key recommendations of 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.

The fourth feature is interaction. The transition 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?), although the latter have their place in the first cycle. Techniques such as think-pair-share, information gap activities, role-plays and task-based learning described by N. S. Prabhu and developed by Jane Willis in A Framework for Task-Based Learning (1996) maximise students' production time. A classic information gap activity for the third cycle: two students have different maps with complementary information about a theme park and must question each other to complete them. They can only solve the task 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 intonation). In Primary Education, recasts and clarification requests tend to work better than explicit correction, which can heighten the affective filter — also Krashen's — and block production.

With verbal classroom speech understood, we can turn to what is simultaneously happening in the non-verbal channels.

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

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

Kinesics studies bodily movements with communicative value: gestures, facial expressions, posture, gaze. The term was coined by the North American anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell in Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication (1970), where he argued — in a debated but influential claim — that in a face-to-face conversation only between 30% and 35% of meaning is transmitted through words. Birdwhistell distinguishes several types of gesture: emblems (gestures with conventional meaning, such as a thumbs-up for OK), illustrators (accompany and support speech, such as showing the size of something), regulators (organise interaction, such as nodding to indicate continued listening), affect displays (express emotion, such as a smile) and adaptors (unconscious gestures that channel tension, such as touching one's hair). This typology, recorded 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 attention.

Proxemics studies the communicative use of space: the distances we maintain with 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: intimate (0–45 cm, for very close persons), personal (45–120 cm, conversations between acquaintances), social (120–360 cm, formal or work interactions) and public (more than 360 cm, lectures, presentations). Hall also emphasised 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 correcting individually, how students are positioned in a role-play.

Chronemics studies the communicative use of time. Hall also pioneered this field. 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 manifests 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 responses — the duration of activities, pedagogical silences, transitions. The teacher who respects wait time opens space for students to think in English; the 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, weariness or surprise simply by changing the tone. English intonation, moreover, carries crucial grammatical and pragmatic information: the rising curve at the end of a yes/no question, the falling curve in statements, marked intonation for emphasis on contrast or new information. Working on paralinguistics from the first cycle — through singing, dramatisation, imitating voices — prevents the monotone intonation problems that many Spanish speakers carry throughout their lives.

To these four classic 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 LOPIVI requires to be handled with sensitivity: physical contact with students must be respectful, professional and always oriented towards the wellbeing of the child.

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

Arguably no figure has been repeated so often and so poorly understood 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 transmitted through words, 38% through tone of voice and 55% through body language." This reading is, frankly, false. And the candidate ought to 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 collected in Silent Messages (1971), addressed a far more circumscribed 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 those — receivers interpret the message by trusting 7% to what is said, 38% to tone of voice and 55% to facial expression. For instance, if someone with an angry face and a curt tone says «I'm absolutely fine, thank you», the receiver will conclude that the person is not fine; the words carry little weight, 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 never purported to describe the whole of human communication, but exclusively the communication of attitudes and feelings in situations of inconsistency. Applying them to a technical lecture, a mathematics lesson or a grammatical explanation is absurd: if in an English lesson only 7% of content came from words, we would not be teaching English but mime.

What remains for the EFL classroom, then? Three honest lessons, free from internet exaggeration.

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 tired face and a monotonous voice conveys the opposite message. Coherence between the verbal and the non-verbal is therefore a daily professional requirement.

Second: when Primary students, especially in the early years, receive a verbal message in English that they do not yet fully understand, they rely heavily on the teacher's non-verbal language to decode it. This is why teacher talk accompanied by clear gestures, expressive facial expression and marked intonation is comprehensible well beyond the group's actual lexical level. Krashen said something equivalent when he spoke of comprehensible input supported by extralinguistic context.

Third: when students attempt to produce in English without yet having all the verbal resources available, 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 with the notion of extralinguistic strategy addressed below.

In summary, the 7-38-55 rule must 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

If Mehrabian studied the incongruence between the verbal and the non-verbal, Paul Ekman, an American psychologist, devoted his career to another essential question: are emotional expressions universal or are they 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 exists a small set of basic universal emotions whose facial expression is recognisable by human beings of any culture — including isolated cultures with no prior 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 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 (AU): 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 wrinkles at the outer corners of the eyes) with AU 12 (raising of the lip corners), whereas a social smile may activate only AU 12 without AU 6, making it less sincere and recognisable as such by most observers.

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

First implication: the universality of basic emotions means that the teacher can work on emotions in English from the first cycle by drawing on facial images that any child, whatever their mother tongue, will recognise. A classic sequence for Year 1 or Year 2 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 the 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, showing anger openly may be considered a serious breach of courtesy. Exploring these differences in the third cycle, in relation to English-speaking countries, introduces students to the intercultural dimension without recourse to stereotypes.

Third implication: the teacher who can read students' facial expressions has a constant and reliable source of information about the group's comprehension, interest, frustration or exhaustion. A vacant gaze, a furrowed brow, a knowing smile or a stifled sigh tell us more about classroom dynamics than any formal assessment. This connects directly with formative assessment and with the systematic observation that the Valencian curriculum identifies as privileged assessment instruments in Primary Education.

One final clarification: the most recent research in emotional psychology — particularly that of Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made (2017) — has qualified Ekman's universalism, arguing that emotions are constructed culturally from a shared biological base. The debate remains open and the honest candidate must be aware of it. Yet the didactic usefulness 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 core of the topic: the extralinguistic strategies that the teacher and students mobilise in the EFL classroom to sustain, supplement or repair communication. The CEFR includes them explicitly as an essential component of strategic competence and the Valencian curriculum includes them among the basic knowledge of the area. Primary students, especially in the first and second cycles, do not yet command 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 a driver of lexical learning. The teacher must model first, generously: an English teacher who puts her whole body into a story encourages students to do the same when their turn comes.

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

Eye contact. Eye contact fulfils several functions in the classroom: it regulates turn-taking, signals attention and interest, expresses closeness and trust, and gives confidence to the shy student. In Anglo-Saxon cultures, maintaining eye contact with the interlocutor is associated with sincerity and trustworthiness; 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 recently arrived from different cultural contexts. In classroom mechanics, eye contact helps to capture attention before giving an instruction, to sustain a conversation with a particular student without losing sight of the group, and to encourage those who need it 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 patterns from Spanish or Valencian, which have a more limited tonal variation. Working on intonation from the first cycle — by imitating character voices in stories, exaggerating questions and exclamations, singing songs with marked prosody — prevents this classic problem. A useful technique is backchain drilling: decomposing a long sentence from the end backwards, maintaining the intonation, and repeating it 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, weariness. 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 quality of student contributions, especially from shy or less linguistically proficient students. In the EFL classroom this principle is golden: if the teacher waits two or three seconds longer before reformulating in Spanish or answering themselves, they give students the space to process the English. On the other hand, the 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 idea 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.

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 accompany words with physical actions (pointing, showing, giving, taking away, moving). The infant connects sounds with movements, gestures and objects, and in this way builds a robust receptive repertoire that later enables production. Asher argued that something equivalent must occur in the EFL classroom: students must listen and respond to instructions in English accompanied by physical action before beginning to produce. This is known as the phase of comprehension before production.

TPR methodology is put into practice in sessions in which 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 physically. 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 comes at which students spontaneously begin giving instructions to other classmates, and production begins. TPR is therefore especially powerful in the first cycle of Primary Education.

The advantages of TPR are numerous and well-documented:

• Reduces the affective filter: students move, play, laugh, and anxiety diminishes.
• Generates massive comprehensible input through the word-action connection.
• Activates kinaesthetic memory, especially effective with young children.
• Is inclusive: students with linguistic difficulties, newly arrived students and students with sensory or cognitive disabilities can 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). For this reason it must not be understood as a standalone method but as a methodological phase especially useful in the first cycle and as a transversal resource at all levels. Nor does it replace oral production: one must move progressively from comprehension only to real interaction.

In the contemporary EFL classroom, TPR coexists with other methodological approaches — the communicative approach, Prabhu and Willis's task-based learning, 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 becomes part of their active repertoire.

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 principal driver in the early years.

9. DIDACTIC APPLICATION BY CYCLE IN PRIMARY EDUCATION

Verbal and non-verbal communication is addressed across all three cycles of Primary Education, but with differentiated emphases that the candidate should know and be able to argue before an examining panel.

In the first cycle (Years 1 and 2, ages 6–8), non-verbal communication is the primary scaffolding. TPR, already described, occupies a substantial part of the 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 an imaginary 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. At this cycle, moreover, the teacher must pay particular attention to their own non-verbal language: smile, warm eye contact, modulated voice, broad 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). She then plays Simon says (Simon says touch your nose. Simon says touch your ears. Touch your mouth! — no, Simon didn't say!). Students then dramatise in pairs a doctor examining a patient (role-play) with the support of 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 by a growing prominence of structured oral work and early writing. Students already command routines, have a broader active vocabulary and can sustain simple exchanges. The teacher introduces metalinguistic reflection on intonation («Listen: Are you happy? Yes, I am», marking the rising curve 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 project Welcome to our school. 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 stop on 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. Verbal communication becomes more sophisticated (multi-turn exchanges, narration in the past tense, expressing opinions, simple hypotheses) and non-verbal communication is addressed in a more conscious and reflective way. Intercultural mediation activities appear: comparing gestures across different cultures, identifying misunderstandings due to non-verbal differences, explaining the non-verbal norms of the Spanish classroom to a newly arrived classmate. 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. Brief debates on adapted topics (Are mobile phones good for children?) introduce students to the argumentative dimension and to associated gestures (turn-taking, active listening, agreeing, respectfully disagreeing).

Throughout all three cycles, the teacher also attends to diversity in the classroom. Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have specific difficulties in understanding non-verbal communication and pragmatic norms; the teacher must make some conventions explicit (what a gaze means, what silence means, when it is one's turn to speak) and provide clear visual supports. Students with hearing difficulties rely intensively on kinesics and lip-reading, which requires the teacher to attend carefully to their position in front of the group and to their articulation. Students with dyslexia benefit especially from the TPR and multisensory approach, which minimises dependence on written language. Newly arrived students who do not yet share the language of the classroom find in non-verbal communication their first avenue of integration: universal gestures, basic emotions, the warm eye contact of the teacher and classmates are their first language. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in the Valencian curriculum encompasses this attention to multiple means of access, expression and engagement.

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 of them answers a different question and, together, they offer a complete picture of the phenomenon.

Edward T. Hall (The Silent Language, 1959; The Hidden Dimension, 1966) answers the question "what non-verbal dimensions does communication have?" by founding two key disciplines — proxemics and chronemics — and opening the way to the systematic study of the silent language that accompanies all human interaction. His distinction between monochronic and polychronic cultures offers the teacher a framework for understanding many everyday misunderstandings, particularly with students or families from different cultural backgrounds. His description of interpersonal distances has direct applications in 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 facilitate interaction, respecting the personal space of the introverted student, and working explicitly on courtesy norms in Anglo-Saxon cultures.

Paul Ekman (Emotions Revealed, 2003; Facial Action Coding System, 1978) answers 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 systematising their facial expression through the FACS. His contribution, although today qualified by authors such as Lisa Feldman Barrett, remains the foundation of all emotional education and 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 consciously attending 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) answers the question "how does all this translate into a concrete methodology for the classroom?" with Total Physical Response, a method that places physical response to linguistic input as the core of learning in the early years. TPR is not merely a repertoire of activities: it is a theory of learning that connects 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 predominance of oral work 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 into any teaching sequence.

Articulating these three contributions — Hall, Ekman, Asher — allows the candidate to present to the examining panel a coherent and professional picture of non-verbal communication in EFL: a phenomenon culturally modulated (Hall), universally rooted in emotional biology (Ekman) and didactically operationalisable (Asher). That synthesis is completed by Dell Hymes's SPEAKING model — introduced 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 luxury for those who teach English at Primary level: 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 they understand a sentence, they imitate an intonation before they conjugate a verb, they remember a gestured song years after they have forgotten the flashcards. The 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 drastically reduces the linguistic anxiety of their students.

Current legislation — LOMLOE, Real Decreto 157/2022, Decreto 106/2022 del Consell, CEFR and its Companion Volume 2020 — enshrines this integral vision of communication. Extralinguistic strategies are specific competences; non-verbal communication appears in basic knowledge; learning situations require the simultaneous mobilisation of verbal and non-verbal resources. The communicative conception of language, addressed in Topic 1, is completed here by the awareness that communicating is always, also, communicating with the body, with tone, with gaze, with space and with time.

The major contributions surveyed — Hall and proxemics-chronemics, Birdwhistell and kinesics, Mehrabian and his qualified 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 communicative experience that is connected with real life — one in which English is learnt as the things that matter are learnt: with the whole body, with emotion and in relation to others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LEGISLATIVE REFERENCES

Legislation

1. 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.
2. Ley Orgánica 8/2021, de 4 de junio, de protección integral a la infancia y la adolescencia frente a la violencia (LOPIVI). BOE núm. 134, de 5 de junio de 2021.
3. 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.
4. Decreto 106/2022, de 5 de agosto, del Consell, de ordenación y currículo de la etapa de Educación Primaria. DOGV núm. 9402, de 10 de agosto de 2022.
5. Ley 4/2018, de 21 de febrero, de la Generalitat, por la que se regula y promueve el plurilingüismo en el sistema educativo valenciano (PEPLI). DOGV núm. 8240, de 22 de febrero de 2018.
6. Recomendación del Consejo de la Unión Europea, de 22 de mayo de 2018, relativa a las competencias clave para el aprendizaje permanente. DOUE C 189, de 4 de junio de 2018.
7. Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge University Press.
8. Council of Europe (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages — Companion Volume. Council of Europe Publishing.

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.

STUDY GUIDANCE

1. Memorise the legal framework before any author: LOMLOE (LO 3/2020), Real Decreto 157/2022, Decreto 106/2022 del Consell, Ley 4/2018 PEPLI, CEFR 2001 and Companion Volume 2020. Panels value having every didactic claim anchored in current legislation.
2. Master the 7-38-55 rule of Mehrabian with all its qualifications. It is a classic trick-question topic: if you cite it without qualification, you lose marks; if you qualify it correctly, you gain them. Be able to explain in thirty seconds why the figure only applies to affective communication in situations of incongruence.
3. Learn the six basic universal emotions of Ekman (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust) and the contemporary qualification by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Holding an informed position on this debate demonstrates up-to-date reading.
4. Be able to explain in under a minute what Asher's TPR is, how it differs from a traditional method and why it works especially well in the first cycle. It is one of the three or four methods that any examining panel expects you to know in detail.
5. Prepare at least two classroom examples per cycle (Years 1–2, Years 3–4, Years 5–6) illustrating how you work on non-verbal communication. Without concrete examples the topic remains abstract and the panel suspects a lack of practical experience.
6. Review the connection between non-verbal communication and attention to diversity: students with ASD, students with hearing difficulties, newly arrived students. Topics that integrate NEAE with EFL methodology make a difference.
7. Rehearse the oral presentation and time it. For a written development of approximately 5,500–6,000 words, the oral exposition runs between 40 and 50 minutes: practise cutting sections 5 and 8 without losing the overall framework, as they can run long if you do not watch the clock.