Languaging dynamics in interactive lecturing: exploring an embodied approach to deep learning in L2 higher education contexts

ABSTRACT

The present study aims to explore an embodied approach to students’ deep learning; specifically, how deep learning is interactively achieved through teachers’ languaging dynamics and multimodal representations in interactive lecturing in L2 higher education (HE) contexts. The purpose is to understand how an instructor’s embodied and multimodal pedagogical practices of interactive teaching facilitate students’ active classroom engagement in lecture sessions that are often considered a form of passive knowledge transmission. The case study focuses on the languaging dynamics mobilised by the target teacher participant, who has been recognised as a representative of teaching excellence due to an international background and rich localised teaching experience. Aligned with the theoretical underpinnings of an embodied approach to learning from a constructivist perspective, this study focuses on the multimodal repertoire employed by the teacher’s use of gestures to stimulate students’ responses to the pedagogically designed high-order questions. We argue that this complementarity encourages thinking and active learning in the knowledge transfer. Further, this embodied interactive teaching mode with the affordances of gestures not only supports learning potential for information transmission but also affords action potentials for cognitive thinking and projected interaction for knowledge transformation in the active learning process.

KEYWORDS:

• Deep learning
• languaging dynamics
• multimodality
• interactive lecturing

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dan Shi

Dan Shi is Assistant Professor in the School of Education and English, University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Her research areas include multimodality, systemic functional linguistics, classroom discourse analysis, genre-based pedagogy, and sociological theory of education, with her current work on contextualisation, learning styles and scaffolding within L2 contexts to explore the connections between visual, spatial and verbal resources in learners’ engagements with texts.

Derek Irwin

Derek Irwin is Associate Professor in the School of Education and English, University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He specialises broadly in systemic functional linguistics, and focuses more specifically on movement of lexical items across languages, textual analysis and approaches to literacy and language skills for post-secondary writers.

Ping Du

Ping Du is Assistant Professor in the School of Education and English, University of Nottingham Ningbo China. She is working with discourse analysis, intercultural communication, and is interested in the interpretation and explanation of workplace interactive behaviours drawing on pragmatics, sociolinguistics and cross-cultural psychology.