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TitleWhat Does the Body Say?
SourceCASLS Activity of the Week
Body

This week’s activity suggests a way to take some time to focus on gesture in the language classroom. It can be integrated with other objectives that are already part of a class plan. It focuses on observation and exploration, rather than any right answers. Discussions can be in pairs or groups as well as whole-class. Note that accommodations will need to be made for students with visual impairments.

Objective: Learners will be able to recognize and provide interpretations for target gestures or other communicative actions in L2 audiovisual texts through guided discussion and analysis.

Procedure:

  1. Preparation: Find a video that shows a speaker or speakers using the target language and also gesturing or using other meaningful embodied action during communication. The video can come from a movie, a talk show, an advertisement, a YouTube channel, etc. Choose a clip that seems interesting to you in terms of how gesture is being used, for example if it seems typical or atypical, appropriate or inappropriate, important to the meaning of the specific clip, and/or socially meaningful in some way.

For example, if you are teaching polite ways to say ‘no’ in Japanese, you could choose a clip such as this one that includes a common Japanese gesture for negation (see Jungheim, 2006 for research on this gesture). If you are an Italian teacher the ‘mano a bursa’ gesture can be a great one to look for in any Italian media. Both of these gestures have discourse-grammar as well as pragmatic functions and are rich in potential for analysis.

  1. Without mentioning gesture, ask students to watch the video holistically first for content. What are the participants talking about, and what is the context? Watch and listen again for additional detail (these details can be related to any other curricular goals you and your students may have in the class).
  2. Turn off the sound and play the video again. Ask students to watch carefully for aspects of embodied action and communication that they may or may not have noticed with the sound on. What do they see? Do these gestural elements seem to complement, enhance, or even contradict the verbal messages in their meanings or functions?
  3. If necessary, draw attention to the specific elements of gesture or other embodied action that you would like them to notice, and discuss these. If the gestures are known within the community or have been studied in research, you can share this information too. Invite students to compare and contrast similar gestures and their functions within or across other languages and cultures, if relevant.
  4. As an extension out of class, ask students to do a visual "treasure hunt" for the gesture or similarly functioning gestures in the target language, and see how many they find. For example, they can look for it in movies or other online videos or channels. These do not only have to be specific, well-known gestures, but can be any patterns of movement, eye gaze, or posture that may be associated with gender, age, social status, and so on.
  5. As an additional extension, ask students to consider whether they would feel comfortable adopting these gestures or embodied actions in the L2, like the Italian students mentioned  in today's Topic of the Week article. Whether or not they do, research indicates that L2 speakers and bilinguals tend to have subtle gestural ‘accents’ from their other languages in any case!

References

Jungheim, N. O. (2006). Learner and native speaker perspectives on a culturally-specific Japanese refusal gesture. IRAL, International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 44(2), 125-143.

Peltier, I., & McCafferty, S. (2010). Gesture and identity in the teaching and learning of Italian. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 17(4), 331-349.

Publishdate2018-10-15 02:15:03