Asking, answering and assessing with hands: how co-speech hand gestures contribute to question-initiated interactions in Chinese kindergarten classroom

ABSTRACT

In teacher-fronted kindergarten classrooms, questions are an efficient strategy to attract students' attention and guide them through a lesson. However, few studies have examined the related issues by taking co-speech hand gestures into consideration. By annotating and analyzing a videotaped lesson in a Chinese public kindergarten, the present study intends to solve the following problems: (1) What types of questions are posed by the teacher? (2) What types of hand gestures co-occur with these questions and how do gestures contribute to them? (3) What are the patterns of question-initiated sequences and how do the co-occurring hand gestures function? Three types of Mandarin questions (yes-no questions, specific/content questions and positive–negative questions) and a variety of sequence patterns are seen to recur in the selected class. Meanwhile, hand gestures function in multiple ways: (1) signifying, visualizing and reproducing a propositional content (i.e. referential function), and (2) indicating an off-propositional aspect of a question, an answer or a comment (i.e. pragmatic function). This study demonstrates that analyzing extra-speech modes, and especially co-speech hand gestures, is worth both the academic efforts of linguists and practitioners of early childhood education.

KEYWORDS:

• Gestures
• Mandarin questions
• question-initiated sequences
• kindergarten classroom
• teacher and children interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kendon (2017) proposed a fourth function called operational function, which, according to its definition ‘to function as an operator in relation to the speaker’s spoken meaning’, is considered in this research as a specific instance of modal function.

2 These notations are not idiomatic. Rather, they are adapted from Kendon (2004), Li (2014), Rusk, Sahlström, and Pörn (2017), and Filipi (2018).

3 Streeck (2008) labeled this gesture as ‘index up’. He listed several functions of this gesture, and proposed that ‘it marks the speech as pedagogical’ and that it indicates what has been said is ‘important, instructive, and new’. Index finger up displays the authoritative position of the speaker by ‘presenting him/herself as instructor’. Streeck’s proposal is also proved by the current case.

4 Gazing at the teacher is an unmarked action of the children in class, which does not offer any answer to the teacher’s questions, but simply demonstrates that the students are paying attention. In this case, gazing will not be treated as a way of responding to the questions.

5 Emblems are conventionalized gestures coded with specific meaning of their own in a linguistic or cultural community, and can be used as if they were spoken words (McNeill 1985).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by Xi’an International Studies University Foundation for Graduate Students (‘The Research on Pronunciation of Inner Mongolia English Majors: A Multimodal Corpus Perspective’: BSYJS201810), the Applied Linguistics Research Project: Multidimensional and Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Grant No. 0180101), and The China National Foundation for Social Sciences (‘Development and Application of Multimodal Pragmatic Competence Corpora for English Majors in China’: 16XYY010).