Use of Gestures in the Classroom

In the classroom, a teacher would use gestures where the information is not being understood by the student, or when the grammar of an utterance is more complex. This is where scaffolding takes place. In a related study, students’ use of non-verbal practices, such as eye gaze and gesture, is examined during repairs (Radford and Mahon 2010c). In their study, Radford and Mahon focused on how children are provided with opportunities for language learning through discourse with their teacher, the ways in which they demonstrate uptake of these opportunities and the role of non-verbal resources of gaze and gesture in such discourse (Radfod, Ireson & Mahon, 2012). Similarly, Roth (2001), in his literary review on the topic of gestures in teaching and learning, included an example of a physics explanation by a high school student. He discovered that the listener did not understand the message completely only with the verbal component; that is, when no gestures were used. However, only with the gesture component is the listener able to understand what it is being communicated. This is otherwise known as an augmentative function of gestures (Millar, Light & Schlosser, 2006).

Gesture is indeed a prevalent phenomenon, occurring across ages, tasks and cultures (Goldin-Meadow, 2000). Research in math lessons suggests that learners are better able to understand when speech is accompanied by meaningful gestures (Cook

& Goldin-Meadow, 2006). Goldin-Meadow, Kim and Singer (1999) studied how teacher’s gestures influenced third and fourth grade students’ ability to solve and explain mathematical equivalence problems. They coded teachers’ verbal and gestural problem solving strategies against students’ responses. It was found that the students were more likely to reiterate the teacher’s use of strategies when the teachers had used gestures to accompany the strategy taught. Their findings proved that learners are able to take advantage of information presented with gestural representation. However, the same positive outcome when learners are given access to teacher’s gestures may not be applicable to a classroom of learners with lower levels of language competencies or oral language skills.

According to Broaders, Wagner- Cook, Mitchell, and Goldin-Meadow (2007) implicit knowledge can be revealed when gestures are used. In their research, they were keen to determine if fourth-grade learners were able express implicit mathematical knowledge if gesture production was encouraged (Broaders et al., 2007). Students were asked to solve two sets of mathematical equivalence problems. They were asked to solve the first set and explain how they solved them without any instructions about their hand movements. For the next set, they were asked to solve the problems and explain how they solved them with either of the following conditions: (1) no instructions about their hand movements (2) instructions to move their hands or (3) instructions to not move their hands. The study assessed the number of new strategies expressed by the students and found students in the gesture- encouraged group added more problem-solving strategies in comparison to those assigned to the control and gesture discouraged groups.

This result led to a second study in which Broaders et al. (2007) explored whether children who were encouraged to gesture would be more receptive to instruction. In this study, a different group of participants completed six problems on paper and then explained their reasoning while either being instructed to gesture or being discouraged from gesturing. Subsequently, the students were given a lesson in mathematical equivalence. Those who were encouraged to gesture solved more problems correctly in a post-test after the math instruction in comparison to those who were discouraged from gesturing. These results suggest that the children had implicit access to the knowledge that they had produced in their own gestures

(Garber, Alibali, & Goldin-Meadow, 1998). Therefore, since learners have at least partial access to cognitive information represented in the nonverbal gesture, it is relevant to ask if learners would be able to access and benefit from information produced in gestures used by their teachers.

There were several attempts in the past to study the importance of gestures in English as second language classrooms. That is the case of Allen (2000), who observed one female teacher in a listening comprehension lesson. Her study deals with a detailed description of the gestures being used by the Spanish teacher. Nevertheless, the essential part focuses on the students’ commentaries during interviews. They all agreed on the “great aid” the teacher’s gesture was for their understanding. (Allen, 2000, p.169). Allen’s (2000) observations reveal that the L2 teacher used gesture for a number of functions, including helping students understand lexical items and other linguistic aspects of the L2. More recently, Lazaraton (2004) conducted another video-recorded observational study of the speech and gestures used by a non-native English as a second language instructor. In his micro-analytic research he observed the gestures and non-verbal behavior the teacher used while explaining the meaning of 18 lexical items. He discovered that the types of gestures applied were, as in Adam’s work, iconics, emblems, deictics, and beats (McNeill, 1985). Overall the results showed that gestures are an essential scaffolding tool of pedagogy in English as second language (L2) classrooms. Lazaraton states that “classroom L2 learners receive considerable input in non-verbal form that may modify and make verbal input (more) comprehensible” (2004, p.111).

As we cannot perceive gestures as an individual system, but as one aspect of the same communicative process, it is essential to highlight the fact that speech and gestures do not occur at the same time. The gesture begins slightly before the spoken component. It may happen that when the speaker departs from the topic at hand, the speaker uses gesture as an indication of that departure. Most importantly, some of the gestures occur when the speaker considers his utterance to be slightly unintelligible to the listener. The speaker uses a gesture, so the listener can understand the message. McNeill (1992, p.208) states that “a gesture should occur exactly where the information conveyed is relatively unpredictable, inaccessible, and/or discontinuous”. Being aware of the gestures teachers produced in the classroom involves going one

step further in the field of language learning. According to Sime (2008), all of the learners that were under her study reported that gestures were helping in relating meaning and improve comprehension. And most importantly, gestures were “perceived as providing scaffolding assistance within the ZPD” (Zone of Proximal Development) (Sime, 2008, p. 264), that is, they contributed positively to the process of classroom interaction.

From the above sections detailing gesture and scaffolding literature, it is hoped that the researcher has shed some light into the justifications for the use of gesture and scaffolding classifications as a framework for the analysis of the study. To examine the process of scaffolding with gestures and speech, the scaffolding classifications by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) as well as Tharp and Gallimore (1988), and the gesture classifications by Martinec (2000) and McNeill (1992) were applied on the analysis of the teacher’s multisemiotic discourse in the reading classroom. This study demonstrates that speech, together with gestures, are used as essential tools for scaffolding in the reading classroom, in order to benefit students’ comprehension and overall understanding of their reading.