Språkv/Språkdid/CogLing: Language, gestures and teaching

There is wide agreement that it is helpful to use gestures when teaching and learning. At the same time, using gestures in the foreign language classroom in a consistent way entails choosing and agreeing on which movements to pair with linguistic units, such as sentences, words or morphemes. Past studies have sought to examine the ways teachers use gestures in the classroom (Alibali, Young, Crooks, Yeo, Wolfram et al., 2013) and the related beliefs teachers have (Nathan et al. 2020). However, in order to understand the potential effectiveness of gesture-based instruction, it is also important to know how learners perceive individual gestures themselves. We address this gap by developing and implementing a gesture rating instrument to measure learners’ attitudes towards 40 word-gesture pairs learned in the context of foreign language learning, allowing us insight into what makes a good teaching gesture from the perspective of learners.