Asking, answering and assessing with hands: how co-speech hand gestures contribute to question-initiated interactions in Chinese kindergarten classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACT In teacher-fronted kindergarten classrooms, questions are an efficient strategy to attract students' attention and guide them through a lesson. However, few studies have examined the related issues by taking co-speech hand gestures into consideration. By annotating and analyzing a videotaped lesson in a Chinese public kindergarten, the present study intends to solve the following problems: (1) What types of questions are posed by the teacher? (2) What types of hand gestures co-occur with these questions and how do gestures contribute to them? (3) What are the patterns of question-initiated sequences and how do the co-occurring hand gestures function? Three types of Mandarin questions (yes-no questions, specific/content questions and positive–negative questions) and a variety of sequence patterns are seen to recur in the selected class. Meanwhile, hand gestures function in multiple ways: (1) signifying, visualizing and reproducing a propositional content (i.e. referential function), and (2) indicating an off-propositional aspect of a question, an answer or a comment (i.e. pragmatic function). This study demonstrates that analyzing extra-speech modes, and especially co-speech hand gestures, is worth both the academic efforts of linguists and practitioners of early childhood education.