Download The non-verbal communication in the preschool institutions

M.Sc. Biljana Novaceska
University “ St. Kliment Ohridski”-Bitola
Faculty of education – Bitola
ul.,,Vasko Karangelevski’’ b.b. Bitola-7000,
Republic of Macedonia
The non-verbal communication in the preschool institutions
Abstract
The tutorial – educational process embraces those who educate and those who are to
be educated. These roles of the tutorial – educational process can be characterized as unity of
the education and learning when it comes to their interlocking and self conditioning.
The success rate of the tutorial – educational process mainly depends of the quality of
the interaction and the level of the interactive connection within the communication.
In order to succeed in interactive communication in preschool education, there must be
also nonverbal communication which have enormous meaning because children as well as
educators have greater believe in nonverbal communication than verbal. Beside that there is a
need of transfering some implicite messages with the help of nonverbal signs and those which
has been transfered already became unexceptable. If a child is active and work on the other
side of the playground, or if the educator is working with the whole group, he could not
communicate individually using the non-verbal signs only. The term non-verbal
communication means “ body language as a method who makes people and some animals
active in transfering information, consciously or unconsciously, with body movements, or
facial expressions. Body language has three characteristics: as a conscious replacement of the
speech, as a support of the speech ans as a mirror of true mude.”
Key words: tutorial – educational process, preschool education, nonverbal communication,
child, educator, nonverbal signs, body language.
Main text
The education and the mentoring, integrated as a whole, represent unique symbiotic
educational process which can be planned, organized and executed in the educational activity
in the pre – educational institutions based on interpersonal relations between the protagonists
in the communication process. Therefore, there is no education and mentoring out of the
interpersonal relations and mutual interaction.
Due to the fact that the nonverbal signs are very subjective index of the emotional,
intellectual and social development of the child, recognition of their status and functions by
the mentor or educator is a significant value pointing to the other components of the child’s
personality.
For the interactive communication in the preschool education to be realized, it must
be introduced non-verbal communication that has a great importance because the children
and the educator have greater trust in the non-verbal than in the verbal communication.
Besides that, some messages can be implicit transferred with mediation of non-verbal signs
because explicitly transferred become unacceptable. If the child works at the end of the
children’s playroom or if the educator is working with the whole group he cannot
communicate individually with every child and the only possibility for him is the use of nonverbal signs. The success of the non-verbal communication within the children’s playroom
often depends on the fact how good the children and the educator can “read” the other’s silent
messages, because the non-verbal code is responsible for about 55% of the complete meaning
of the message. The non-verbal communication represents all intentional and unintentional
messages that are not written or spoken.
The non-verbal communication has six basic functions: “expressing emotions,
expressing common attitudes of the participants in the communicational interaction,
presenting our characteristics, following, support and completion of the verbal
communication, conventional expression of different types of social interaction.”
All these functions help the communication interaction that is a process that lasts, and
during the dialog words are exchanged followed by non-verbal signs. The verbal and nonverbal signs occur and progress in some order; it’s aimed to affirm the correctness of the
action, the structure of the interaction, its strategy i.e. the specific action of the interaction
according to the participants’ intentions and the situation in which the communication takes
place.
When it comes to children from preschool age, first occur small number of non-verbal
signs that are probably inborn because they occur at very early age in many cultures. For
example, the facial expression when somebody is laughing, or eyebrows’ contracting are used
to direct the attention on some other interaction. Basically, the facial expression changes
from initial, biologically established stage to stage that is under big influence of the studying
and experience. The non-verbal signs adept to the target group differ from those adept to an
individual child. The successful educator waits longer until the children compose the answer
to the set question.
For the difference to be made between the verbal and the non-verbal form of human
communication are made many divisions. The first refers to the existence of vocal and nonvocal communication. “The vocal communication would represent all the actions that
emanate from the speech, and the non-vocal emanates from all the types of communication
except the speech. The second division would be verbal-non-verbal whereupon the verbal
would refer to the use of words and the non-verbal to everything that is vocal and everything
that is non-vocal behavior that is not verbal. Hereby we get four categories:
-
Vocal-verbal ( pronounced words as linguistic units)
-
Vocal-non-verbal ( verbal emphasis, voice quality)
-
Non-vocal – verbal ( including all written and printed words as linguistic
units)
-
Non-vocal – non-verbal (that includes the position of the body, the face, the
gestures, mimicry etc.)”
There are many aspects of the non-verbal communication: vocal expression (yawning,
coughing, whine, scream etc.), facial expression (the expression of the face), gesture
expression (movement of the hands during the communication), postulate expression (the
body position), proxemic expression (the role of the space), spatial behavior ( speed,
orientation, space behavior), the rhythm, the clothes as communication, the movement in the
space, the doodling, drawing and painting (on paper, on hand, on a desk, on wall etc.).
The more and better the educator know these aspects his ability to interpret the signs
that children emit would be bigger and at the same time he would be more conscious for his
own non-verbal communication and the impressions he leaves at the children from the
appropriate preschool group.
In many cases, the children with physical shortages show normal non-verbal signs,
but trough the years their sensibility for non-verbal sign is not developing. That is big
difficulty within the framework of the preschool group and the educator’s help is infallible.
Such introvert children don’t express their wishes and emotions, they often don’t respond to
signals and that’s why they don’t manage to avoid the problems. After all, it seems that the
shortage of non-verbal abilities it is not connected with the children’ school abilities.
The children from preschool age have limited verbal abilities and very often they
aren’t able to find the right words to express their wishes, ideas, and emotions. The educator
communicates not only via words, but with every movement he makes, facial expression and
change in his tone have importance. It is good if the child understands the body language,
because the more he understands the different forms of communication he will be more
successful in the communication and it would be easier for him to establish contact with the
other children. That’s why the children should be canalized to percept and to learn to
understand the facial expression, the movement and the voice.
Some types of non-verbal signs, the facial expression for example or holding the head
and the intonation that occur at preschool age are inborn. The conscience for control of their
usage develops during the educational process. The other types of signals as gestures and the
ability for understanding the non-verbal signs develop slower and are always connected with
the children’s common cognitive ability. So it must be paid special attention to the nonverbal communication as an infallible part of the entire interaction and communication during
the educational work in the preschool education.