INTRODUCTION
Communication is one of the God’s great gifts bestowed to human. God not only created speaking potential with diverse dialects in the human body, but also taught him how to use it through inspiration, his inner instinct, or external guidance. Among different forms of communication in human communities, education, or teaching, requires effective communication with the learner if it is to be successful. The person with a holy job as teaching should be competent in a variety of skills, one of the important of which is body language or non-verbal communication.
Communication means social development and the source of culture and spiritual development so that lack of communication leads to a relative static state in human life, which prevents any kind of social development. One of the characteristics of professional teachers is their ability to engage in effective, meaningful and purposeful relationship with educators. In case a teacher is scientifically competent but is not able to communicate effectively with the learners, he/she is not able to teach satisfactorily; thus, the teaching-learning process has not been fully implemented.
IMPORTANCE OF NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION AS A MEDIUM OF EXCHANGING INFORMATION
NON-VERBAL communication is a channel of communication that is based on unspoken signals, which are influenced by several filters such as culture, environment, personality, etc. There are several channels to convey, such as facial expression, body language, posture and gesture, voice tones and other nonverbal cues. Nonverbal communication, contrary to most people think, carries most of the information exchanged through communication activities. According to Merabia’s study (1971), which is a famous study cited many times among academic paper, verbal content makes up only seven percent, while nonverbal content takes up a sizeable amount of ninety-three percent of our communication activity. Price (2003) found that nonverbal content is at least sixty-five percent more powerful than verbal content (whether it is spoken or written). Moreover, people often trust what they see from behavioral cues more than what they hear from conversations. Merabia (1971) stated that if verbal and nonverbal cues are in conflict, then nonverbal cues carry as many as 13 times the weight verbal content does. In fact, science advancements have shown that human beings are subconsciously influenced by nonverbal signals. The sympathetic nervous part of the brain reacts to other people’ behaviors, which was mentioned by Perin (2003) as a fight-or-flight mechanism dated back to mammalian ancestors
Non-verbal communication is often more subtle and more effective than verbal communication and can convey meaning better than words. For example, perhaps a smile conveys our feeling much easier than words. Silent speech is of great importance in human’s daily interactions and it influences one’s chances of failure or success in personal and professional social encounters.
Also, the Holy Quran in several cases refers to this point, for example for the tolerant and poor people, it is stated: “You would know them by their appearance” and says about the hypocrites: “and you will know them by the tone of their speech”. Also, Imam Ali (AS) believed that one’s appearance is the indicator of his/her internal state. Whenever a person conceals something in his/her heart, it manifests itself in the expressions of his face. “No one can hide anything in the unseen since it is evident in his/her thoughtless words and his/her face”.
According to the studies conducted, at each conversation only seven percent of the concepts are expressed in the form of spoken words. Most of the information is transferred through the complex combination of appearance, posture, limb movement, sight, and facial expressions. On the other hand, the effect of most body language acts lower than the addressee’s awareness, i.e. the addressee receives the profound effects of the issue without being aware of it. So, the people who have the ability to use these skills have the potential to guide others in a particular direction to achieve their goals, and precisely for this reason most of the human interactions involve non-verbal communication. Body language has the power to transfer the attitudes and feelings of people to others and in many cases can be even more effective than verbal messages.
In this regard, numerous studies have been conducted by Oskouhi et al. On the role of non-verbal communication on educational performance of faculty members of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resource University in Sari; the results of the study showed a significant positive correlation between non-verbal communication skills and educational performance of Sari faculty members of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources University.
Conclusion
This article reviewed had some limitations. First, most of the studies had focused on other types of communication rather than purely on non-verbal communication. Moreover, in most of the studies, little attention had been paid to non-verbal communication. Also, due to lack of studies in the field of educational communication, there was no access to recent studies in this regard.