Gestures in the classroom
The teacher’s use of gestures in the classroom has been studied by various scholars in recent years across a range of subjects.These include Mathematics (Cook, Duff)', & Fenn, 2013), Physics (Carlson,Jacobs, Perry, & Church, 2014), Chemistry (Abels, 2016), Language (Inceoglu, 2015; Matsumoto & Dobs, 2017) and Music (Simones, Schroeder, & Rodger,2015).The studies suggest that the teacher’s apt use of gestures as a mode of meaning-making can enhance students’ learning (Klooster, Cook, Uc, & Duff, 2015; Novack & Goldin-Meadow, 2017; Cook, 2018) as well as maintain and regulate the students’ behaviour in the classroom (Sime, 2006; McCafferty & Rosborough, 2014).
Sime (2006) explored how students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at a Scottish university perceived and interpreted their teacher’s gestures in their EFL class. The students were asked to review a video clip of an earlier lesson they had. They were to identify and comment on their teacher’s nonverbal behaviours such as gestures, eye contact, and facial expressions. They observed that the teacher would use gestures to regulate and organise the students during class activities and the management of speech turns. For instance, the teacher would point to a specific student as an indication that he was to respond, and deny a student’s turn to speak by wagging their index finger or pointing their palm(s) to another student.
McCafferty and Rosborough (2014) studied the classroom interaction between the teacher and students in a second-grade classroom in America. Specifically, the researchers examined the teacher’s use of gestures and found that they were used to serve a regulative function in the classroom as well. For instance, when a student waited to walk between the teacher and another student in conversation, the teacher swept her right arm in a deictic gesture without disrupting her talk with the second student, sending a private message to the first student that he could take the path between them.
Classroom management literature has also highlighted the importance of the teacher’s use of gestures as part of regulating the class (see e.g. Kounin, Gump, & Ryan, 1961;Galloway, 1976;Neill, 1991;Neill & Caswell, 1993). In particular,Neill (1991) and Neill and Caswell (1993) offer practical suggestions to teachers when and how to use their gestures as well as other types of nonverbal behaviours to direct students’ attention, regulate students’ behaviours, and build a positive relationship with their students. Where the focus in these books were on the teacher’s use of gestures simply as a technique in classroom management, these works pave the way for a recognition and deeper appreciation amongst teachers that they can use gestures with aptness and fluency, together with the other semiotic resources, in the design of students’ learning experience.
A systemic functional approach to gesture
A typology of gesture
In this section, and the following sub-sections, the Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SFMDA) approach to gestures is outlined. The purpose is to offer analytical categories in the systematising of gestures in the classroom, which will allow the teacher-practitioner to reflect on her use of gestures as a semiotic mode in embodied teaching, and to support the educational researcher with a coding scheme to annotate and analyse the types of gestures and the nature of meanings made.
In the study of actions, Radan Martinec, an independent researcher and consultant, working from the SFMDA theoretical orientation, proposes that actions, can be described as Presenting Action, Representing Action, and Indexical Action. This is based on formal observable criteria. Martinec formulates the systems for action which include movement and proxemics as ‘they all express the same broad kind of meaning’ (Martinec, 2001: 144). Martinec (2000: 243) defines Presenting Action as ‘most often used for some practical purpose’ and ‘communicates non-representational meanings’. Representing Actions‘function as a means of representation’ and are strongly coded representations. Indexical Action usually only co-occurs with speech and ‘in order to retrieve its full meaning, one has to have access to the second-order context which is represented simultaneously in indexical action and concurrent speech’ (Martinec, 2000: 244).
Lim (2011, 2019a) extends Martinec’s descriptions of action as a taxonomy for the classification of gestures in relation to its communicative intent and its relationship with language (Figure 4.1). Presenting Action involves Performative Gestures — gestures that serve a practical function, such as picking up an object or scratching an itch, and are primarily non-communicative in nature. Representing Action and Indexical Action involve Communicative Gestures. While the intent of the Performative Gestures is not to communicate, they may, at times, be construed to convey meaning, thus serving also as Communicative Gestures. For instance, the action of scratching one’s head is a Performative Gesture as a reflex to an itch. However, it can also be interpreted as a Communicative
Gesture to suggest uncertainty. As observed, the boundary between the classification of Communicative Gestures and Performative Gestures is, at times, nebulous. Nonetheless, the meanings are usually disambiguated when the gesture is interpreted in context, including in its co-text and inter-text. Hence, it is arguably useful not to disregard Performative Gestures, despite them being not primarily communicative in nature.
Communicative Gestures can be Speech Dependent, such as in Indexical Action; or either Speech Independent or Speech Correspondent, such as in Representing Action. Speech Dependent Gestures are gestures which co-occur with language and require the accompanying language to fully access and interpret their meanings. Speech Independent Gestures make meaning in the absence of speech, whereas Speech Correspondent Gestures co-occur with speech and its meanings are contextualised with what is said. The typology in Figure 4.1 can be described in relation to the classical categories of gestures, that are emblems, regulators, adaptors and affect display. Emblems, such as the thumb-up sign, are Communicative Gestures that are Speech Independent. Illustrators, such as numbering ideas expressed verbally with the fingers, are Communicative Gestures that are Speech Dependent. Regulators, such as moving the hand in beat with the speech rhythm, are Communicative Gestures that are Speech Dependent, and usually signal importance of what is being said. Adaptors and Affect Display, such as scratching and shivering, are Performative Gestures that have no wilful communicative intent.
FIGURE 4.1 Classification of gestures Reproduced from Lim (2019: 87).
