Ruth Breckinridge Church
List of John Benjamins publications in which Ruth Breckinridge Church is involved.
Journal
ISSN 1568-1475 | E‑ISSN 1569‑9773
Title
Why Gesture?: How the hands function in speaking, thinking and communicating
Edited by Ruth Breckinridge Church, Martha W. Alibali and Spencer D. Kelly
Co-speech gestures are ubiquitous: when people speak, they almost always produce gestures. Gestures reflect content in the mind of the speaker, often under the radar and frequently using rich mental images that complement speech. What are gestures doing? Why do we use them? This book is the first… read more[Gesture Studies, 7] 2017. vii, 433 pp.
2017 Chapter 18. So how does gesture function in speaking, communication, and thinking? Why Gesture?: How the hands function in speaking, thinking and communicating, Church, Ruth Breckinridge, Martha W. Alibali and Spencer D. Kelly (eds.), pp. 397–412 | Chapter
Abstract
This concluding chapter reflects on the book’s collected works that encapsulate, in the Aristotelian sense, gesture’s efficient causes (i.e., mechanisms that stimulate gesture) and its final causes (i.e., purposes that gesture serves). We conclude that gesture is… read more
2017 Chapter 1. Understanding gesture: Description, mechanism and function Why Gesture?: How the hands function in speaking, thinking and communicating, Church, Ruth Breckinridge, Martha W. Alibali and Spencer D. Kelly (eds.), pp. 3–10 | Chapter
Abstract
Gestures offer additional information that is not captured in speech. This essential finding is a bouncing off point for the chapters in this book, which attempt to explain what purpose gesture serves when we speak, think and communicate. Aristotle’s framework is used to… read more
2017 Chapter 13. Making and breaking common ground: How teachers use gesture to foster learning in the classroom Why Gesture?: How the hands function in speaking, thinking and communicating, Church, Ruth Breckinridge, Martha W. Alibali and Spencer D. Kelly (eds.), pp. 285–316 | Chapter
Abstract
Teachers regularly use gesture as part of multimodal instruction to both break and make common ground. Teachers break common ground when they introduce new ideas and new mathematical practices. Teachers make common ground by connecting new ideas to students’ prior… read more
2014 The effect of gestured instruction on the learning of physical causality problems Gesture 14:1, pp. 26–45 | Article
Recent research has demonstrated instruction that includes gesture can greatly impact the learning of certain mathematics tasks for children and much of this work relies on face-to-face instruction. We extend the work on this problem by asking how gesture in instruction impacts adult learning from… read more
2013 Students learn more when their teacher has learned to gesture effectively Gesture 13:2, pp. 210–233 | Article
Teachers’ gestures are an integral part of their instructional communication. In this study, we provided a teacher with a tutorial about ways to use gesture in connecting ideas in mathematics instruction, and we asked the teacher to teach sample lessons about slope and intercept before and after… read more
2007 The role of gesture in memory and social communication Gesture 7:2, pp. 137–158 | Article
This study asked whether: (1) adults process representational gesture and (2) gesture is remembered over time. Forty-five college students (ages 22–38) were each randomly assigned to watch a set of Speech Only and Speech + Gesture video stimuli (containing statements that were extracted from social… read more