Gesture and Identity in the Teaching and Learning of Italian

Abstract

This study investigated the use of mimetic gestures of identity by foreign language teachers of Italian and their students in college classes as a form of meaning-making. All four of the teachers were found to use a variety of Italian gestures as a regular aspect of their teaching and presentation of self. Students and teachers also were found to mirror each other's gestures. None of the teachers had been video-recorded before the study and all were surprised to see the degree to which they appeared to be Italian, although at the same time all believed this to be an important and positive aspect of their teaching. In offering an explanation for these findings we consider the role of gesture as a social semiotic in learning another language, how teachers use gesture to prolept students into a possible future as embodied communicators of the language (identity within a figured world), the process of communicative actuation as it relates to learning a language across different timescales and environments, and how all of the above relates to the zone of proximal development and its application to frontier regions of development.