Renia Lopez-Ozieblo

Estudios previos han señalado que la observación y representación de gestos benefician el aprendizaje de vocabulario en lenguas adicionales. Este estudio explora si los contenidos didácticos enriquecidos con gestos facilitan la comprensión de conceptos abstractos, como el marcador se en español. Veinte sinohablantes de español participaron en un curso en línea compuesto por seis unidades sobre las funciones de se. Los participantes se dividieron en dos grupos: uno con contenidos enriquecidos con gestos y otro sin ellos. Antes y después del curso, se evaluó su conocimiento a través de entrevistas en línea, donde produjeron frases basadas en viñetas y explicaron el uso del marcador. Sus respuestas fueron analizadas cuantitativamente para medir su comprensión práctica y conceptual. Ambos grupos mostraron una mejora en la producción y conceptualización del marcador se, lo que indica que el curso fue beneficioso. Sin embargo, en contra de lo esperado, el grupo sin gestos obtuvo resultados ligeramente superiores, aunque las diferencias no fueron significativas. Factores como el reducido número de participantes y el formato en línea podrían haber influido en los resultados. El presente estudio examina los beneficios de los gestos en la adquisición de conceptos abstractos y destaca la necesidad de más investigaciones en este ámbito.

Adaptors, self-touching movements that supposedly lack communicative significance, have often been overlooked by researchers focusing on co-speech gestures. A significant complication in their study arises from the somewhat ambiguous definition of adaptors. Examples of these movements include self-manipulations like scratching a leg, bringing a hand to the mouth or head, and fidgeting, nervous tics, and micro hand or finger movements. Research rooted in psychology indicates a link between adaptors and negative emotional states. However, psycholinguistic approaches suggest that these movements might be related to the communicative task. This study analyzes adaptors in forty Cantonese speakers of English as a second language in monologues and dialogues in face-to-face and online contexts, revealing that adaptors serve functions beyond emotional expression. Our data indicate that adaptors might have cognitive functions. We also identify micro-movements, flutter-like adaptors or “flutters” for short, that may have interactive functions conveying engagement. These findings challenge the traditional view of adaptors as purely non-communicative. Participants’ self-reports corroborate these interpretations, highlighting the complexity and individual variability in adaptor use. This study advocates for the inclusion of adaptors in gesture analysis, which may enrich understanding of gesture–speech integration and cognitive and emotional processes in communication.

Immediacy behaviour includes both verbal and non-verbal actions such as praising students, calling students by their names, using humour as well as using gestures, smiling, making eye contact or getting close to students. In a classroom context, immediacy affects the affective relationship between students and teachers as well as the content taught. From an intercultural perspective, Zhang (2006) and Lopez-Ozieblo (2015) have pointed out that some of the original items used to measure immediacy might not be relevant or appropriate in an Asian classroom, such as touching students or direct gaze. However, the bigger issue is, as Smythe and Hess (2005) noted, that most studies report retrospective students’ perception, after the class has finished, and not actual class observations. This study seeks to confirm previous findings reporting that perceived teachers’ behaviours could be correlated to learners’ evaluation scores of the class/topic and the teacher and to fill in that gap in the literature by correlating students’ perceptions with the reality observed in the classroom. The objective was to identify whether students’ perceptions of affective behaviours correspond to what happens in the classroom. Convenience sampling was used to gather naturally occurring data and was video recorded in eight hours of graduate (5 hours) and undergraduate (3 hours) lectures at the same Hong Kong institution. In addition, students were asked to fill in a teacher and class survey, evaluating how they perceived the teachers’ behaviours, whether they smiled, called them by their names, etc., during the session under observation. The results of our own observations and the students’ perceptions were correlated for the behaviours observed. Overall, our results confirm the findings of previous studies that correlate teacher immediacy behaviours with better students’ performance. Our results also suggest that students’ perceptions do usually reflect the reality of the classroom. Results also indicate moderate positive significant correlations between some of the actual behaviours and how learners evaluate the teacher. This suggests that, even in an Asian classroom, teachers should be aware of immediacy-developing behaviours.

Previous studies on gestures and personality suggest an ambiguous picture of the effects of the various personality dimensions on the different types of speech-gestures and adaptors. In foreign language learning an additional variable to take into account is proficiency, which some studies have shown to affect gestures. In this study, we explore how various intrinsic variables, including personality, proficiency, gender and age affect the gestures of 61 Cantonese speakers of English as a second language. Participants were asked to narrate a video cartoon. Their proficiency and the frequency of gestures produced was based on those narrations. A functional categorization of gestures was followed, dividing them into semantic and discursive, and that also noted adaptors and micro-gestures, referred to as “flutters.” Personality was self-reported using the 44 question Big-Five inventory. Correlations and a series of generalized linear models were developed to explore the interplay between variables. Agreeableness was found to be positively correlated with semantic gestures; and neuroticism and age were negatively correlated with flutter duration. Contrary to the findings from previous studies, no significant relationships were found between neuroticism and adaptors or semantic gestures, nor between extraversion or openness and semantic gestures. Proficiency and gender had little effect on gestures. As personality has been shown to be an important factor in gesture production in mother tongue speakers, we expected to also see a similar result with foreign language speakers, this not being so suggests that other variables, aside from those tested, should be considered. In particular, the results suggest that emotion and emotional constructs, such as anxiety, self-confidence or empathy, might have a greater impact on gesture production than proficiency or personality, a point which should be taken into account especially in language evaluation contexts or professional contexts with second language speakers.

This study evaluates the benefits of gesture-enriched grammatical explanations to native speakers following an embodied cognitive approach. Spanish mother tongue speakers were taught the functions of a complex Spanish linguistic unit, “se.” For half the participants the explanations were enhanced with gestures and the other half received the same explanations without gestures. Their knowledge of the functions was tested before the treatment and then immediately after and a month after the treatment. Our results indicate that both groups benefitted from the explanations equally. However, in the long-term, participants in the gestures group consolidated their knowledge while those in the non-gestures group showed a steeper learning decay that those in the gestures group. This suggests that gestures might have a positive effect in learning which is only observable in the long-term after the knowledge has been consolidated.