This paper discusses various teaching scenarios in which physical response may be employed to balance verbal response. Physical actions and movements make meaningful alternative activities that can achieve concentration and alertness from learners. They serve to reduce stress, create an informal and spontaneous atmosphere of learning, and facilitate language acquisition. The potential of physical response is especially noteworthy in eliciting interaction and stimulating communication based on reading texts. Many activities of this kind can be used to review and memorize vocabulary and to act out the parts on which the teacher would like the students to focus. Physical activities become even more practical and applicable when realia are combined to assist the performer who may find a particular action or movement hard to perform.
This paper discusses some important features of non- linguistic activities in reading-skill development, describes ways of devising, presenting non-liguisctic activities in EFT. Non- linguistic response to text materials in the class is playing an increasingly important role in the present teaching context where too much emphasis is laid on linguistic performance and too often students are expected to respond to working/testing texts in verbal ways. As far as reading is concerned, non-linguistic activities serve to build up reading strategies, serve to develop real communicative proficiency. In presenting non-verbal tasks in the classroom, the paper illustrates some typical teaching items such as 'dealing with vocabulary', 'dealing with key sentences/phrases that represent the contents of the text '. In closing the paper looks at the satisfactory effect achieved through the combination of linguistic and non-linguistic activities.
