Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Verbal-Nonverbal Link

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

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

The book is divided into three parts. The first provides background information on nonverbal behavior, its role in TL communicative, affective and...