La comunicación en la clase de lengua extranjera: comunicación verbal y no verbal. Estrategias extralingüísticas: reacciones no verbales a mensajes en diferentes contextos.

The first part of this essay is to study Communication in the foreign language class and verbal and non verbal Communications. The second part of this essay will study extralingüistic strategies including non verbal reactions to messages in different contexts.

First of all, I would like to point out an important change that has taken place in the teaching of foreign languages in past few decades. Traditional approaches used to treat foreign language teaching and learning as a package of knowledge that needed to be analysed and observed as successive series of rules mostly grammatical that needed to be learnt before moving on to further sets of rules. The use of the target language in class for communication purposes was only marginal.

The communicative approach with its focus on communication in the target language as both as means and an end in itself is a relatively phenomenon in language teaching. It was developed by ROBERT LANGS in the early 70s, has greatly changed the way foreign languages are learnt and taught not only in Spain but worldwide. I will refer to this with more detail later on.

• To develop the first part of this topic: Communication in the foreign language class, I will deal with the Communication theory. For this purpose, I will firstly present the definition of communication. Secondly, I will discuss the main types of communication and finally I will try to identify the nature of communication.