Renia Lopez-Ozieblo
Some basic information on gestures and second language acquisition
Gestures are meaning-making hand and arm movements co-occurring with speech. Head and body movements can also convey meaning, as can facial expressions. However, I mostly look at hand gestures (click here for a more in-depth introduction to gestures - paper in Spanish).
Gestures can be categorized by form and their relationship with the semantic or pragmatic content of speech. The former are ‘referential’ – re-enacting, drawing, moulding, representing or pointing to the speech content (Müller, 1998). Pointing gestures, also known as deictic, help establish connections between units within the utterance functioning as anaphoric references. Gestures can also have pragmatic functions: metadiscursive, interactive or cognitive. Metadiscursive gestures help manage the flow of the discourse, making parts of it salient, like beats, indicating clarifications or disfluencies. Interactive gestures engage interlocutors by pointing at them, managing the turn or ensuring understanding. Cognitive gestures link parts of the utterance by indicating inferences, causality and consequence or they provide additional modal information about the speaker’s stance on the utterance (click here for more information on this classification of gestures by their pragmatic function).
Introduction to the pragmatic function of gestures.
Many gesture researchers believe that speech, gesture and thought are integrated, forming one unit (at least in fluent speakers). The idea, the concept, is externalized through both speech and gesture and, at the same time, these two modalities help develop the concept (click here for more on the gesture-speech unit). However, it seems that in less fluent speakers, such as learners of a second or foreign language, this integration speech-gesture might not be so well developed, it is not so “automated” and so it almost seems as if there might be two systems, one dealing with gestures and one with speech (coming soon draft paper).
That is why, in second language learners, gestures can provide valuable information on how proficiency is developing. For example, lower proficiency speakers might gesture to represent a concept if the word is eluding them, or the gesture might come before the word as the linguistic system takes longer to identify the right unit. Disfluencies such as interruptions or pauses can also be indicators of language proficiency, but it is important to bear in mind idiosyncratic behaviors (observable in the mother tongue as well) that might not be related to proficiency at all (click here for more information).
When learning a second language, one of the most difficult things to acquire is the pragmatic meaning of all the communicative cues available (click here for more information). Very often native speakers make use of gestures to provide pragmatic nuanced meaning that are lost to L2 interlocutors. This might be the case with the Spanish marker ‘se’. Traditionally, ‘se’ has been taught as a reflexive pronoun, and yet it has over 12 functions, some similar, that go well beyond that of a reflexive. Native speakers often gesture with occurrences of ‘se’ and by observing these it might be possible to identify the function of the marker (more information on ‘se’ in Mexican and Spanish native speakers and on the relationship between ‘se’ and gestures from a cognitive linguistics perspective).
For more information and articles on gestures, visit the nternational Society for Gesture Studies Hong Kong Hub website where you will find copies of papers and talks by gesture scholars.