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Article published In: Gesture
Vol. 20:1 (2021) ► pp.30–62

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Handling language

How future language teachers adapt their gestures to their interlocutor

 | Aix-Marseille Université, Laboratoire Parole et Langage (CNRS)
 | National Louis University
 | Aix-Marseille Université, Laboratoire Parole et Langage (CNRS)
Published online: 22 November 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19031.tel
Abstract
This paper addresses the question of how speakers adapt their gestures according to their interlocutor’s proficiency level in the language of the interaction especially in the specific context of foreign language teaching. We know that speakers make changes in their speech when addressing a non-native speaker, called Foreigner Talk (Ferguson, C. (1975). Toward a characterization of English foreigner talk. Anthropological Linguistics, 171, 1–14.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) to make their speech more comprehensible. However, whether and how gestures are also modified along with speech has hardly been addressed in the literature. In this study, we examined the speech and gesture of future teachers of French in a word explanation task to see what types of adjustments they made when explaining a word to a native speaker and a non-native speaker. We had ten future teachers of French explain the same 12 words to a native and a non-native speaker of French and compared the explanations. We found that the future teachers produced significantly more gestures, significantly longer gestures in duration, significantly more illustrative (iconic and deictic) gestures, and significantly larger gestures when addressing a non-native interlocutor. These results show that native speakers make not only speech adjustments but also gesture adjustments in addressing non-native speakers.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Communication Accommodation Theory
  • Foreigner talk
  • Teacher talk, pedagogical intent and pedagogical gestures
    • Current study
    • Hypotheses
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Procedure
    • Data
    • Coding
    • Analysis: Software and method
  • Results
    • Interaction, speaking and gesturing time spans
    • Gesture rate
    • Mean duration of gestures
    • Gesture dimension
    • Gesture space
    • Qualitative results
      • Same speech, different gestures
      • Noticeable changes in speech and gesture
    • Summary
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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