Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The 1st International Multimodal Communication Symposium, Barcelona, İspanya, 26 - 28 Nisan 2023
Providing imagistic thoughts of the messages, gestures are indispensable components of communication. They establish a high degree of intersubjectivity among interlocutors by developing a sense of the shared social, physical, symbolic, and mental space (McCafferty, 2002). By providing two simultaneous views of the same process' (McNeill, 1985, p. 350), gesturally enhanced input engenders greater comprehension and even acquisition in language learning (Gullberg, 2008). Unlike gestures used for everyday communicative purposes, teachers’ gestures are pedagogically informed and used for a particular purpose in language classrooms (Stam & Tellier, 2021). As stated by Tellier (2006), teachers’ gestures can be classified as information gestures, classroom management gestures, and assessment gestures, indicating that teachers’ gestures are multifunctional and pedagogically informed. Language teaching in video-mediated environments has become a common channel for language teaching all over the world, especially after the sudden outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. As a result, new video-mediated tools such as Zoom and Webex have been predominantly integrated into language teaching, which in turn has paved the way for synchronous video-mediated interaction (henceforth VMI). In addition to verbal cues, teachers’ facial expressions, gestures, and body stances are considered to be the key factors affecting students' social presence (Wei et al., 2012) and help students establish a relationship with teachers (Witt & Wheeless, 2001). Studies focusing on VMI revealed that teachers deployed gestures for classroom interaction management (Holt et al., 2015; Malabarba et al., 2022) and explicate lexical items (Codreanu & Celik, 2013). The language classrooms have broadened their physical borders to online environments not just because of the pandemic but also the opportunities that these environments provide. Therefore, it is crucial to understand online interaction to develop a better pedagogical design and exploit the opportunities of these environments (Jakonen et al., 2022). Against this background, this study focused on two research-led questions on (1) the functions and (2) sequential organizations of EFL teachers’ gesture use during synchronous VMI English in L2 classrooms. Following the Jeffersonian transcription convention (2004) and Mondada’s multimodal transcription convention (2018), the data was analyzed via Multimodal Conversation Analysis. Accordingly, the teachers utilized a variety of gestures based on their pedagogical purposes in video-mediated L2 classroom interaction for language explanations (vocabulary and grammar) and classroom interaction management (turn management and giving instruction). This study unveiled that the prominent function of teachers’ gestures was to create a mutual physical and mental space for learners by bringing the physical description of abstract concepts into a shared virtual world across screens. Moreover, it is quite apparent that teachers’ gestures share similar and different properties in synchronous VMI and face-to-face classrooms.
Keywords: Language teaching, Teachers’ gestures, Video-mediated interaction,
References:
McCafferty, S. G. (2002). Gesture and creating zones of proximal development for second language learning. Modern Language Journal, 86(2), 192–203.
McNeill, D. (1985). So you think gestures are nonverbal? Psychological Review, 92(3), 350–371.
Gullberg, M. (2008). Gestures and second language acquisition. In Nick C. Ellis & Peter Robinson (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 276- 305). London: Routledge.
Wei, C. W., & Chen, N. S. (2012). A model for social presence in online classrooms. Educational Technology Research and Development, 60, 529-545.
Holt, B., Tellier, M., & Guichon, N. (2015). The use of teaching gestures in an online multimodal environment: the case of incomprehension sequences. In Gesture and Speech in Interaction 4th Edition.
Malabarba, T., Mendes, A. C. O., & de Souza, J. (2022). Multimodal Resolution of Overlapping Talk in Video-Mediated L2 Instruction. Languages, 7(2), 154. MDPI AG.
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