Learners sometimes find it difficult to recognise phatic communication. For example, a learner may interpret the American English phatic structure ‘What's up?' as a question that needs an answer.
Example
Waving hello is non-verbal phatic communication and saying ‘How's it going?' is verbal.
In the classroom
To explore phatics, learners can analyse the verbal and non-verbal phatic communication from a video extract, and then prepare new dialogues with more examples.
Further links:
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/listening-body-language
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teenagers-video-0