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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Commun.
Sec. Multimodality of Communication
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2024.1457533
This article is part of the Research Topic Multimodality in Face-to-Face Teaching and Learning: Contemporary Re-evaluations in Theory, Method, and Pedagogy View all 3 articles

Gesture alignment in teacher student interaction: A study concerning office hour consultations using English as the lingua franca

Provisionally accepted
Paloma Opazo Reyes Paloma Opazo Reyes 1,2*Alan Cienki Alan Cienki 1Bert Oben Bert Oben 2Geert Brône Geert Brône 2
  • 1 VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • 2 KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In this study, we explore the presence of gesture alignment in office hour consultations, a form of academic talk characterized by private face-to-face dialogues between a lecturer and a university student (Limberg, 2007). Unlike classroom interactions, the topic of these consultations “is determined and initiated by the student” (Limberg, 2007, p. 178). Our objectives were to describe the patterns of gesture alignment in these educational settings; to determine the direction of the copied behavior (i.e. who copies whom?); and to understand the temporal structuring of these instances. We analyzed 12 office hour consultations, involving Spanish undergraduate students and lecturers from universities in England, Ireland, and Sweden. All the conversations were held in English. The annotation considered three domains: the timing of matching gestures (i.e., if the aligned gestures appeared in a Simultaneous, Consecutive, or Later manner), the form features of the aligned gestures (hand shape, movement, and orientation), and the function of the gestures (representational, deictic, or pragmatic). Our results show that although there are important differences between dyads, there were four general findings. First, aligned gestures mostly took place in a Consecutive manner. Second, gesture alignment is shown to achieve shared understanding between interactants, but this can be manifested in different ways: from the active negotiation of meaning, to the signaling of agreement. Third, paired gestures become useful in educational contexts where the teachers and students include native and nonnative speakers, as they contribute to disambiguating meaning. Fourth, many cases of matching gestures happen due to the presence of recurrent gestural forms. Overall, our results are in line with previous evidence that has highlighted the role of gesture alignment in grounding processes, related to the achievement of mutual agreement between participants. Matching gestures are a helpful resource during office hour consultations— a form of academic talk where content is being explained and negotiated

    Keywords: gesture alignment, Matching gestures, Teacher-student interaction, office hour consultations, Pragmatic functions

    Received: 30 Jun 2024; Accepted: 24 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Opazo Reyes, Cienki, Oben and Brône. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Paloma Opazo Reyes, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.