3. Body language helps to improve reading
The purpose of Senior English teaching is to train the students' preliminary ability of using spoken and written English. In the senior school, we lay emphasis one the reading ability that serves the students' further study. Here we mainly mention the helpfulness for reading aloud(朗读). Reading aloud helps the students to get a correct pronunciation and intonation and to develop the combination of vocabularies' pronunciation, spelling and meaning. Furthermore it also helps the students to find out the article's internal feelings and appreciate the beauty of the language. A linguist ever said: "A poem is not a poem until it is read." Reading aloud is basic in the middle school, and the teachers should make full use of body language to develop the students' ability of reading aloud.
When reading the sentences, attention should be paid to where to speak softly, emphasize, and raise or lower our tone. To make it clear, we can imitate the strong or soft pats that are used in music teaching, which means to use the arcs to represent different tones. Generally speaking, we use falling tones in declarative and special interrogative sentence, first rising tones and then falling tones in the choosing interrogative sentence. The students in the middle school are not often accustomed to and always confuse them, however, with the help of body language, they can solve the problem much more easily. For example, they use gestures. As they read the choosing interrogative sentence, they raise their hands in rising tones and lower in falling tones. After training for some times, as soon as they read the sentences, they will remind themselves of the gestures. As a result, there will be no problems in rightly reading the sentences at all.
In a word, the vivid gesture together with the fluent English can create a good circumstance of learning, which will surely play an active part in improving the students' reading ability.
4. Body language helps to improve writing.
Writing is one of the four basic skills of learning language, and it is so important a skill that we can even say without it, people can't communicate with others. Not only should the students get some English knowledge and vocabularies, but also the ability to communicate in spoken and written English as what is mentioned in the teaching programs. To some extent, writing is much more important than speaking, for it can spread without the limitation of space and time. Since the students learn English as a media for communication, they should have the ability of writing.
To get rid of the students' feelings of being dull and tiring, an English teacher has to use every possible method. This is the same to the writing. Teachers use different method in order to improve the students' ability of writing, among which, the application of body language can deepen the object impression, such is magnificent in developing the students' writing ability.
The linguist Franklin ever said, "Tell me, I'll forget; teach me, I'll remember; involve me and I'll learn." If we asked the students to write an unfamiliar composition, they would probably be unable to and feel discouraged. However , the students can write excellent articles if they have the experience. In and out of class, we should ask the students to participate some English-related activities, and then ask them to write it down. Take "The First Snow in Winter" for example, having enjoyed themselves in the beautiful snowing and been given some hints, the students can write much better a composition. For contrast to their complete imagination, the students are deeply impressed by the body movement of the teachers and themselves, which surely leads to a better article.