The role of gesture in British Elt in a university setting

Abstract

The fourth chapter concerns the empirical research for the study. The main project aimed at identifying the types of gestures used most often by seven teachers in nine different ELT classes in two university Language Centres. It was designed to discover whether there might be a set of "British" gestures in use by teachers which could be taught to students, in order to help them improve their overall understanding of communicative situations both in and out of class. The development of a set of gesture taxonomies and an appropriate methodology is also described in this chapter.

Chapter 5 details the research findings and records how the analysis of the data revealed not only the surprising frequency with which Emblems occurred across the data, but that, from the very first case study through to the last, strong evidence emerged for the existence of 'teacher gesture' - a classroom phenomenon which seems to share many of the features of teacher talk.

In Chapter 6, the research findings are discussed. It is clear that experienced teachers deploy teacher gesture according to the level of the student(s) being addressed, and that there seems to be a set of fifteen 'prime emblems', and three 'key prime emblems', forming the nucleus of teacher gesture. There is also some evidence to support the notion that humans possess distinct 'idiokinesic repertoires', since when these teachers are engaged in ELT, they draw extensively on teacher gesture, but they clearly possess their own gestural styles and repertoires (which sometimes include 'foreigner gesture').

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record

ASCII CitationAtomBibTeXData Cite XMLDublin CoreDublin CoreEP3 XMLEndNoteHTML CitationHTML CitationHTML ListJSONMETSMODSMPEG-21 DIDLOpenURL ContextObjectOpenURL ContextObject in SpanRDF+N-TriplesRDF+N3RDF+XMLRIOXX2 XMLReferReference ManagerSimple Metadata