Analysing the teachers’ use of gestures in the classroom: A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach

ABSTRACT

Classroom research in the past has mostly been based on the study of the language used by the teacher and students. With the availability of video recording technologies, it is now possible to collect multimodal classroom data, such as the teachers’ use of gestures, positioning, and classroom space to enact specific pedagogy. The challenge for the researchers is how to annotate and analyse such multimodal data. This paper proposes an approach for the annotation and analysis of the teachers’ use of gestures in the classroom for meaning-making. Situated within Systemic Functional Theory, the Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach to the formal and functional classification of teachers’ use of gestures in the classroom is introduced. The approach builds on present research and theoretical conceptions on gestures and extends the classifications with examples from a selection of instances from an authentic classroom corpus. The aim is to develop the theoretical apparatus for the annotation and analysis of the teachers’ use of gestures in the classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Gestures
• multimodality
• Systemic Functional Theory
• classroom orchestration
• Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Victor Fei Lim is presently Lead Specialist and Deputy Director at the Educational Technology Division, Ministry of Education, Singapore. He was PhD Research Scholar at the Multimodal Analysis Lab, Interactive Digital Medial Institute, National University of Singapore, when the study was conducted. His research interests are in multiliteracies, multimodality in education, and educational technology innovations.

ORCID

Victor Fei Lim http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3046-1011

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Singapore National Research Foundation's Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme [Grant Number NRF2007IDMIDM002-066].