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ERIC Number: EJ1281793
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2020
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1350-293X
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Asking, Answering and Assessing with Hands: How Co-Speech Hand Gestures Contribute to Question-Initiated Interactions in Chinese Kindergarten Classroom
Wang, Zhe; Jiang, Zhanhao
European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, v28 n6 p823-846 2020
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.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Elementary Education; Kindergarten; Primary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: China
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A