Pointing at words: Gestures, language and pedagogy in elementary literacy classrooms in China

Abstract

This article presents an analysis and interpretation of teachers’ gestures in elementary literacy classrooms in China. Our underlying questions are: what types of gestures are used and for what purposes are they used, and how are gestures distributed throughout the process of teaching children to read and write Chinese characters? Our overall aim is to better understand the communicative learning context in which young children enter school and the ways in which certain types of gestures are incorporated into and at the same time reflect the pedagogical approach taken. Our distinctive analytical approach uses two different but complementary frameworks and perspectives on gestures. Our results show that the gestures and meanings conveyed through the gestures, reflect a ‘recognition’ pedagogy in which the sound-form correspondence and specific features of a required set of characters for reading and for writing are focused on. The results also highlight the ‘here-and-now’ nature of the teaching strategies, concrete gesture-linguistic meanings, and gestures associated with a traditional classroom arrangement.