Gesture

Second Language Acquistion and Classroom Research

Steven G. McCafferty, Gale Stam, Steven G. McCafferty, Gale Stam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780805860535
• eBook ISBN: 9781135269517
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book demonstrates the vital connection between language and gesture, and why it is critical for research on second language acquisition to take into account the full spectrum of communicative phenomena. The study of gesture in applied linguistics is just beginning to come of age. This edited volume, the first of its kind, covers a broad range of concerns that are central to the field of SLA. The chapters focus on a variety of second-language contexts, including adult classroom and naturalistic learners, and represent learners from a variety of language and cultural backgrounds.

Gesture: Second Language Acquisition and Classroom Research is organized in five sections:

• Part I, Gesture and its L2 Applications, provides both an overview of gesture studies and a review of the L2 gesture research.
• Part II, Gesture and Making Meaning in the L2, offers three studies that all take an explicitly sociocultural view of the role of gesture in SLA.
• Part III, Gesture and Communication in the L2, focuses on the use and comprehension of gesture as an aspect of communication.
• Part IV, Gesture and Linguistic Structure in the L2, addresses the relationship between gesture and the acquisition of linguistic features, and how gesture relates to proficiency.
• Part V, Gesture and the L2 Classroom, considers teachers' gestures, students' gestures, and how students' interpret teachers' gestures.

Although there is a large body of research on gesture across a number of disciplines including anthropology, communications, psychology, sociology, and child development, to date there has been comparatively little investigation of gesture within applied linguistics. This volume provides readers unfamiliar with L2 gesture studies with a powerful new lens with which to view many aspects of language in use, language learning, and language teaching.

PART V: GESTURE AND THE L2 CLASSROOM

12
“Because of Her Gesture, It’s Very Easy to Understand”—Learners’ Perceptions of Teachers’ Gestures in the Foreign Language Class

Daniela Sime

INTRODUCTION

Language learning evolves out of learning how to carry on conversations

(Hatch 1978, p. 404)

Since Hatch suggested the possibility that learners contribute actively to the construction of classroom discourse, there have been calls in EFL research to re-conceptualize communication practices as co-constructed (Breen 1996), mediated (Donato and McCormick 1994; Lantolf 2001), and situated in their social context (Breen 1985, 2001). However, EFL researchers have been overwhelmingly preoccupied with the verbal aspects of language learning, and little attention has been given to gesture or any other form of nonverbal communication.

Nonverbal behavior (NVB) has been the focus of several empirical studies that concentrated mostly on the amount and type of gestures used in the EFL classroom (Antes 1996; Grant and Hennings 1977; Kellerman 1992). Other authors have also referred in passing to the compensatory role of gestures in teaching a foreign language, by providing “extralinguistic cues” to elaborate the information (Krashen 1981; Long 1989) and to “mime” as a way of “describing whole concepts nonverbally, or accompanying a verbal strategy with a visual illustration” (Dörney and Scott 1997, p. 190). Lanzaraton (2004) examined the use of gestures in conjunction with speech by one EFL teacher in the teaching of vocabulary. She concluded that gestures were a fundamental aspect of the teacher’s pedagogical repertoire and played a crucial role in providing second language (L2) learners with comprehensible input.

Although issues of cultural differences and the use of gestures as compensatory devices by language learners have been acknowledged, existing studies on gesture use in the language class have seldom been related to a coherent EFL learning theory. Lantolf (1994) proposed a sociocultural approach to studying L2 learning. Drawing on Vygotsky’s work (1978, 1986), this approach focuses on the key role that social interaction plays in the processes of learning. Central to Vygotsky’s theory is the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which defines an individual’s immediate potential for cognitive achievement. According to Vygotsky, learning occurs in the “zone of proximal development” defined as the dynamic space in which a student could perform a task with adult or peer guidance, a task that could not be achieved alone otherwise. Guidance is, then, a process of mediating learning and tuning it to a learner’s ZPD. Wertsch (1991), when discussing the ZPD, emphasized the importance of taking into account the context of the interaction when considering learning in the ZPD and cognitive development. The participants co-construct the interaction and the ZPD is a function of this coconstruction.

In relation to gesture, McCafferty (2002) has investigated the role of gesture in creating zones of proximal development for L2 learning. In his analysis of a Taiwanese EFL learner speaking with a native speaker, he identified examples of gestural uses in the ZPD (such as use of gestures that become established lexical items, deictic gestures used to reference objects, and imitation of gestures of the native speaker). He concludes that gestures may be used by both native speakers and learners as a self-organizing form of mediation and have the potential to transform the nature of teaching and learning, by creating a sense of shared space (social, symbolic, physical, and mental) between the collocutors.

The present study investigates language learners’ perceptions of teachers’ gestures and other NVBs in the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• I INTRODUCTION TO GESTURE AND ITS L2 APPLICATIONS
• II GESTURE AND MAKING MEANING IN THE L2
• III GESTURE AND COMMUNICATION IN THE L2
• IV GESTURE AND LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE IN THE L2
• V GESTURE AND THE L2 CLASSROOM