Dialogic gestures in Chinese language instruction: enhancing teacher-student interaction

Abstract

This study addresses the understudied embodied functions of dialogic gestures within Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) classroom interaction, examining how teachers and students deploy dialogic gestures—mutually reproduced gestures—as embodied scaffolding. Drawing on embodiment in scaffolding theory and Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA), we analysed 23.5 h of video-recorded classroom interaction collected from three CSL teachers in Mainland China, capturing teachers and students' gestures during teacher-initiated Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) sequences and student-initiated questions. Our analysis identifies three context-specific functions of dialogic gestures not previously emphasized in English-dominant research: (1) teachers use gestures to elicit students' self-correction during feedback; (2) teachers also use gestures to visually cue Mandarin tone contours, addressing the unique pedagogical demands of a tonal language; and (3) students and teachers collaboratively engage in gesture-supported word searches. The MCA demonstrates that dialogic gestures constitute vital interactional resources for meaning negotiation in these CSL exchanges. By illustrating how MCA unpacks the micro-interactional work of dialogic gestures within a tonal language setting, this study extends existing understandings of embodied resources in classroom discourse and expands the methodological toolkit available for analysing classroom interaction.