Gestures are recognized for their contribution to comprehension, especially for language learners (Kelly et al., 1999; Sueyoshi & Hardison, 2005). It is thus not surprising that language teachers use a great deal of pedagogical gestures when in class to help the learners to understand what is being said. However, gesturing in an efficient way while teaching is not innate, and it seems that training pre-service teachers to use their body in a pedagogical way can be useful (Tellier & Yerian, 2018). In this study, our main questions are: how to assess the effect of training on pre-service teachers' gestures? Which features should be coded to account for efficiency for meaning comprehension? Based on workshop on a pedagogical gestures, involving 16 future French teachers, our data consists of video samples of the participants explaining the same words before and after explicit training. The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of training on pre-service teachers' gestures while explaining vocabulary.
We first used features from previous studies (Tellier et al., 2021) to code gestures, i.e. quantity (gesture rate), iconicity, duration and size. However, it appears that they are not always sufficient to assess the quality of these pedagogical gestures. Indeed, when coding data, we noticed that some gestures are sloppy and loose, and it gives an impression of clumsiness whereas gestures that are crisp give a better impression and are easier to understand. To account for the degree of crispness in gesture production, we set up an evaluation scale inspired by sign language coding (Eccarius & Brentari, 2008; Emmorey et al., 2005). This notation system was used on ELAN software (Wittenburg et al., 2006) to code a sample of gestures before and after teacher training by several coders. In this presentation, we discuss the results of this methodology.
Key words: pedagogical gestures, gesture coding, crispness, meaning, gesture efficiency
Bibliography:
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