Pedagogical Gestures Research Articles

Effects of pedagogical gestures on learning abstract grammatical concepts in young adults

Effects of pedagogical gestures on learning abstract grammatical concepts in young adults

(Mis)Archiving the Archive

Abstract (MIS)ARCHIVE is an ongoing project to question and explore the potential of archives, collections, and museums as meaningful artistic and pedagogical spaces. Sometimes it appears that institutions like archives are perceived as being mundane and innocuous, resulting in them being overlooked. Those who do pay attention to them seem to offer two conflicting narratives regarding archives: on the one hand, they are seen as public places where objective truths and collective histories can be found, while on the other hand, they are considered exclusive spaces that are used to shape a view of the past that reflects position and power. The lack of questioning and attention given to spaces like archives is one way that injustices and inequities can be perpetuated over time. The author, an artist and educator, takes up the topic of the archive through a series of artistic and pedagogical gestures. Centering on the actions of (mis)interpretation, (mis)representation, and (mis)use, the author provokes others to engage with archives as sites of knowledge and learning, to question and examine the practices of collecting and preserving, and consider what these sites offer educationally, artistically, and politically.

Nonverbal Communication in Classroom Interaction and Its Role in Italian Foreign Language Teaching and Learning

The purpose of this study is to present the state of the art of recent research on nonverbal communication in L2 classroom interaction, in particular on teachers’ and students’ gestures, and then focus on a case of gestures in an L2 Italian classroom. A corpus of video-recorded interactions (CLODIS) were analyzed to answer the following research question: How do L2 Italian native teachers behave when addressing international students? Are there differences with what has been observed in other foreign language (L2) teaching contexts? Both previous data-based research on multimodality in L2 classes and the analysis on CLODIS show that teachers select and coordinate multiple semiotic modes as interactional resources to complete various teaching tasks. Furthermore, Italian native teachers use not only the typical pedagogical gestures (both iconic and metaphorical), but also culturally specific emblems that may cause misunderstandings or inappropriate mirroring effects. For these reasons, it is important that L2 teachers develop a good multimodal awareness, especially if they teach their mother tongue to foreign students and if they belong to a “contact culture”, as is the case observed in L2 Italian classes.

Compiled by AILA ReN coordinator

Compiled by AILA ReN coordinator

Problematizing the paradoxical pedagogical gestures of ‘embracing diversity’: The case of multicultural education policies in South Korea

The multiculturalist agenda of ‘embracing diversity’ in schools has been criticized for its paradoxical effects of othering ‘diversity-relevant’ students, particularly minorities with an immigrant background. This study aims to critically scrutinize the meaning of ‘diversity’ as a policy problem formed within the policy discourse on multicultural education in South Korea from 2006 to 2020. We argue that the three meanings of diversity—i.e., diversity at-risk, productive diversity, and endurable diversity—indicate a way that identifies ‘multicultural students’ with ethno-racial differences as objects of ‘conditional’ embracing. Thinking with Jacques Derrida's notion of hospitality, we provide insights into a more responsible pedagogical mode of hospitality toward all diverse students, which ruptures the power hierarchies that attend each specific gesture of embracing diversity.

Gestures as scaffolding for L2 narrative recall: The role of gesture type, task complexity, and working memory

This study investigated the extent to which different pedagogical gestures contribute to learners’ foreign or second language (L2) narrative recall, and further discussed how task complexity and task difficulty (i.e. working memory capacity or WMC) influence recall performance. Sixty-four adolescent learners, assigned to four different gesture viewing conditions (iconic gestures, deictic gestures, beat gestures, or no gesture), were required to listen to an instructor telling two stories (one complex and one simple) and then retell both stories twice: once immediately after listening (immediate recall) and a second time two weeks later (delayed recall). Recall performance was evaluated by the number of relevant pieces of event and motion information produced in the participants’ retelling. The results show that L2 learners who were exposed to deictic and iconic gesture conditions outperformed the other gesture groups, particularly in delayed narrative recall, but only in complex tasks where cognitive demands were increased. It was also found that event and motion information was retained for a longer period of time in the deictic and iconic conditions respectively. Although both high and low WMC groups benefitted from viewing gestures, this finding further indicates that the beneficial effect of gestures on learners could possibly compensate for low WMC by providing scaffolding that reduces cognitive burden in narrative recall.

Second language pedagogy: Learners and teachers

This issue of Language Teaching Research includes seven articles that address topics of great interest to second language (L2) pedagogy: the first three contributions focus more on the learner and consider the importance of individual differences such as working and declarative memory in vocabulary learning, the relationship between strategy use and linguistic knowledge for listening comprehension, and how task repetition type impacts young learners’ attention to form. The remaining four articles address topics that relate to the teacher role and consider pedagogical gestures, teachers’ engagement with digital multimodal composing, with task-based language teaching (TBLT), and with teaching for social justice.

Factors in Teachers’ Awareness of Pedagogical Gestures as Enhancement Technique Among English Teachers in Secondary Schools in Enugu State, Nigeria

The study seeks to ascertain Nigerian language teachers’ awareness of pedagogical gestures as an enhancement to teaching and whether this awareness is influenced by teaching location and teacher qualification. The study adopts the survey research design with a sample size of 262 drawn using multi-staged sampling techniques. The Z-test method was used in testing the hypothesis of the study. It was discovered that there was high mean response of teachers on the awareness of pedagogical gestures. There were significant differences in the mean response of urban/rural teachers and no significant differences in the mean response of graduate/non-graduate teacher’s awareness of pedagogical gestures as enhancement technique. Our conclusion is that pedagogical gestures are indispensable in lesson delivery and that their pedagogic values are gained through awareness of them as enhancement technique.

The Role of the Body in Instrumental and Vocal Music Pedagogy: A Dynamical Systems Theory Perspective on the Music Teacher's Bodily Engagement in Teaching and Learning

Instrumental and vocal teachers often employ their body in teaching to facilitate sensorimotor engagement with the voice or an instrument. Yet, teacher’s bodily engagement in instrumental and vocal education is scarcely addressed in music educational research studies. In our view, this scarcity is related to the lack of a framework about the role of the music teacher’s body in instrumental and vocal education. In this article, we will adopt a dynamical systems theory perspective to set first steps in conceptualizing the role of the instrumental and vocal teacher’s body in teaching and learning music. From this perspective, learning processes are viewed as emerging from the learner’s goal-oriented, situated, adaptive actions in the learning environment. Teachers play a significant role in that environment, due to the different types of constraints (e.g. environmental and task constraints) they can introduce to aid learners in finding a solution for a musical task. In this article, we argue that different types of teacher’s bodily engagement can act as constraints in instrumental and vocal music learning, thereby facilitating the learning process in non-verbal ways. To demonstrate this, we describe four types of bodily involvement: physical modelling, action demonstration, pedagogical gestures and touch. In summary, based on existing theoretical and empirical research, the article will present a first conceptualisation of the role of the music teacher in instrumental and vocal education viewed from a dynamical systems approach.

Gesture-enhanced recasts have limited effects: A case of the regular past tense

This study investigates whether gesture-enhanced recasts lead to better production of the English regular past tense. Fifty-nine low-intermediate ESL students at a US university took part in communicative activities in class, during which they received, respectively, no feedback, verbal recasts, or gesture-enhanced recasts, the latter being a verbal recast accompanied by a point-back gesture indicating the non-target-like use or absence of the past tense. All learners also completed two assessments, a grammar test about the regular past tense and an oral production test that was designed to elicit the regular past tense, as a pre-test, an immediate post-test, and a delayed post-test a week later. Then, a repeated-measure ANOVA was used to analyse the linguistic development, using the obtained test scores. The results showed that there was no difference across the conditions in the grammar test, owing to the ceiling effect. On the other hand, learners significantly improved from the pre-test to the post-test in the oral production test, but there were no differences across the conditions. This contradicts a previous finding that teachers’ pedagogical gestures during recasts better facilitated the development of locative prepositions. Further, this study discusses how learning types (rule-based vs. item-based) involved in two different linguistic targets and different gestures used in the two studies may affect the efficacy of recasts.

Theory and methodology of pedagogical-phenomenological video analysis

This paper introduces the methodological approach and the pedagogical-phenomenological practice of video analysis. In a first step, basic structures of phenomenological theories of experience, of embodiment as well as theories of responsivity and image will be introduced. In a second step, watching and perceiving video data is identified as a responsive and participatory experience. In a third step, the methodical ground of our research is introduced by giving an overview of epistemological and methodological aspects of the phenomenological approach. In this context, the individual steps of phenomenological video analysis and phenomenological analysis in general will be put to practice on an example. In doing so, teaching in the classroom is determined as an interattentional form of responsivity, in which showing as a specific pedagogical form of embodiment corresponds with becoming attentive. In a final step, research results on a typology of pedagogical gestures of showing and pointing will be introduced.

O tempo na educação pública: ensaio a partir do movimento “ocupa tudo”

Understanding that the questioning of schooling as a public issue is part of the teacher’s responsibility, we rehearsed an approximation with the “Occupy Everything” movement, aiming at identifying the challenges that these students pose when we exercise pedagogical gestures understanding education as a right, knowledge as a public good and public schools as a common good. The structure of the text, marked by methodology as experience, brings what we consider public, the school as a space of protection and what constitutes authority in the teaching work. In the dialogue with Arendt, Larrosa, Masschelein, and Simons, we approach the impacts that the “Occupy Everything” movement caused, at the moment of our continued formation, outside of Brazil. In the conclusions, we identified the youth leadership of this movement and we highlighted clues for the continuous formation of pedagogical gestures in agreement with a public education that resists the mercantilization and colonization of the study. Keywords: public school, experience, scholastic time.

Da necessidade de interrogar o pensamento: gestos sobre a infância no tempo escolar

We present in this article a discussion about gestures produced from the childhood entry in the interface with the experience of school time. It is a discussion woven inside the center for studies and research in education in particular, the times group of the faculty of education of the federal university of Juiz de Fora/MG. Throughout history, time has been discussed in various ways and still is, as well as childhood, conceptually constructed as a result of social, political, religious, and cultural influences. In the attempt to "start thinking", we ask ourselves about what theoretical formulations have been based on childhood at the interface with school time in the field of education? We defend the central thesis that childhood, in a western cut, has been presented in productions still as social time. It is a recent movement to consider childhood as an event, experience, as opposed to the idea of childhood as the stage of life. As a result, considering infancy related to the tension between social time and time as intensity of the present, implies the need for pedagogical gestures that think this tension and, thus, consider the children of the current, narrowing their relations with the school, with knowledge and with life. To enlighten the issues sewn from our concerns, we chose authors such as Agamben, Leal, Bakhtin/Volochinov, Kohan, Vieira, Bento and Meneghel, Kramer, Borba, who focused on childhood and education. In order to problematize the time category, we dialogued with St. Augustine, Oliveira, Marques C. and Marques L, Skliar. The reading of our interlocutors and our listening with/to the school could subsidize the thought that we can invent ways not only imagined as possible with the perspective of reflecting time, childhood, experience and school on other bases. The interrogation, not the conviction, enables the sense of knowledge in the materiality of our practices, produced inside/outside the university. These are underprivileged subjects in curriculum matrices and disciplines that address the issue of children, their childhoods and temporalities.

Pedagogical Gestures as Interactional Resources for Teaching and Learning Tense and Aspect in the ESL Grammar Classroom

This study investigated the functions of gesture in teaching and learning grammar in the context of second language (L2) classroom interactions. The data consisted of video‐recorded interactions from a beginner‐ and an advanced‐level grammar classroom in an intensive English program at a U.S. university. The sequences of talk‐in‐interaction selected for sequential analysis involved gestures that are used by teachers for explaining English temporal concepts, and those by students to respond to their teacher's gesture. Our analysis revealed that teachers and students repeatedly used abstract deictic gestures and metaphoric gestures in the classroom, which can become important interactional resources for instruction as well as assessment of student learning. Furthermore, students effectively used gestural catchments to demonstrate their understanding of temporal concepts and to construct interactional alignments with their teachers. These findings suggest that gesture is an important element of interactional competence for teaching and learning in L2 grammar classrooms.

Hospitable Gestures in the University Lecture: Analysing Derrida's Pedagogy

Based on archival research, this article analyses the pedagogical gestures in Derrida's (largely unpublished) lectures on hospitality (1995/96), with particular attention to the enactment of hospitality in these gestures. The motivation for this analysis is twofold. First, since the large-group university lecture has been widely critiqued as a pedagogical model, the article seeks to retrieve what may be of worth in the form of the lecture. Second, it is relevant to analyse the pedagogy of lectures that address the topic of hospitality, as there would be a performative contradiction in teaching inhospitably about hospitality.

Designed and Spontaneous Gestures in Elementary Astronomy Education

We make a case for using gestures and actions to understand and convey spatial and dynamic properties of systems. Problems in learning elementary astronomy are analysed in the context of demands of spatial thinking, in a system which is not amenable to direct perception, namely, the sun–earth–moon (SEM) system. We describe a pedagogy which uses gestures (most often in combination with concrete models and diagrams) to facilitate the visualisation and simulation required in elementary astronomy. These gestures are presented in terms of their purpose in pedagogy: to internalise a natural phenomenon, or an astronomical model, or general properties of space. In terms of design these pedagogical gestures mediate between concrete models of the SEM system and related spatial configurations on the one hand, and their corresponding abstract diagrammatic representations on the other: called here the model–gesture–diagram pedagogical link. Next we present some video data on students’ gestures observed during collaborative problem‐solving which took place in the course of our pedagogic intervention. Implications of these results are drawn for embodiment and multimodality of thought.