Have you heard people say that 93% of communication is non-verbal, while only 7% consists of the words themselves?  Over a number of years I had seen this figure quoted in articles and heard it in staffrooms and teacher training sessions.  Every time I came across this number the same questions occurred to me.  How could it be such a high percentage and where did this precise figure come from? The message I was being given in the context of language teaching was that by learning body language our students could do away with a lot of the hard slog learning vocabulary and grammar.

Not wanting to sell my students short I decided it would be a good idea to do some research.  At the time I had just arrived in Paris and so at lunch time, when my colleagues were animatedly chatting away in French, I studied them very carefully, their faces, their expressions and their body movements.  Noticing my intense following of their every move, one of them asked me whether I had understood their conversation.  With the help of my school French, the fact I could speak Spanish and Italian and my careful study of their body language, I had decided they were talking about their morning at work.  In fact they were talking about one of the teacher’s rabbits that had escaped that weekend.  I had understood 0% of their conversation and I was pretty sure that it wasn’t because I wasn’t a body language expert.

Prompted by this experience I decided to do a different kind of research, Google.  I discovered that the figure comes from work done by Albert Mehrabian in the sixties and that he himself feels that his findings have been misinterpreted as people try and apply them to all communication situations.  In his experiments people used only single spoken words from which Mehrabian looked at how much of their feeling and emotion was communicated by the word, how much by the tone of their voice and how much by body language.  He came up with the figures of 7% from words, 38% from voice tone and 55% from their expression and movements.  It is this ‘rule’ that has then been taken by others and applied to much broader situations without further experiments being done.

As a result of my research I was quite convinced and comfortable with my decision that a crash course in advanced body language was not the answer for my students to achieve fluency in a number of languages with very little effort.  However, it did get me thinking about the place of teaching body language in a foreign language class.  The complete acquisition of a language is often not a student’s main or only aim.  Many students have a more specific goal in mind, for example, passing an exam, getting into a school or university, giving an important presentation or impressing a potential employer at an interview.  A student that walks confidently into a speaking exam, smiles at those present, sits forward and shows an interest in the examiner and other candidates, will probably increase their final score simply by giving a positive overall impression. 

I believe how we present ourselves as teachers and classroom managers can also be important.  A teacher once asked me to observe a class of teenagers that she was having problems with.  The first thing I noticed was that she had placed her chair right back against the wall, as far away from the students as possible.  I’m sure the body language professional would have known whether this demonstrated fear, dislike, disinterest or some other attitude or emotion, but it was very clear to an observer that it had a strong negative affect on the classroom dynamic.  In subsequent classes the teacher placed her chair in front of the students and found that this small change made a big difference.

And finally, while our students may be of diverse backgrounds, nationalities, ages, dreams and aspirations, most will share the same goal of effective communication in the language they are studying.  This means that bringing in any of the many texts written about good communication should be a good choice for class discussion and debate.  Rather than needing to set ourselves up as body language experts, we can discover and explore the ideas of real experts on the subject, perhaps try out a few of their suggestions and decide whether we agree or disagree together with our students.  And anyway, if while discussing the subject everyone leans back in their chairs and starts studying their nails at least we’ll know to find a new topic.