Pointing at words: Gestures, language and pedagogy in elementary literacy classrooms in China

Linguistics and Education 55 (2020) 100779

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Pointing at words: Gestures, language and pedagogy in elementary literacy classrooms in China Wendy L. Bowcher ∗ , Zhenzhen Zhang Sun Yat-sen University, 135 Xingangxi Road, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510275, China

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 9 April 2019 Received in revised form 17 October 2019 Accepted 31 October 2019 Keywords: Chinese literacy Gestures Elementary school Recognition pedagogy Chinese characters Elementary reading and writing

a b s t r a c t This article presents an analysis and interpretation of teachers’ gestures in elementary literacy classrooms in China. Our underlying questions are: what types of gestures are used and for what purposes are they used, and how are gestures distributed throughout the process of teaching children to read and write Chinese characters? Our overall aim is to better understand the communicative learning context in which young children enter school and the ways in which certain types of gestures are incorporated into and at the same time reflect the pedagogical approach taken. Our distinctive analytical approach uses two different but complementary frameworks and perspectives on gestures. Our results show that the gestures and meanings conveyed through the gestures, reflect a ‘recognition’ pedagogy in which the sound-form correspondence and specific features of a required set of characters for reading and for writing are focused on. The results also highlight the ‘here-and-now’ nature of the teaching strategies, concrete gesture-linguistic meanings, and gestures associated with a traditional classroom arrangement. © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction That humans are predisposed to communicate with others is evident from observing the development of children who from birth are engaged in a number of communicative acts with those around them, making use of a range of resources such as vocalizations, crying, bodily movements, laughter, and facial expressions. By the time children enter school at around the age of six (give or take a year depending on the cultural situation), they are highly adept “meaning-makers” and “meaning-interpreters” of a range of symbolic systems. However, the school presents an environment with many kinds of new experiences that children need to navigate in order to succeed. Of these new experiences, the most significant is the induction into the process of teaching and learning. Additionally, it is often in the first year of schooling that many children come in contact with written language, the symbolic system that soon becomes incorporated into their repertoire of semiotic resources. This system is introduced in an entirely new environment in which many communicative resources already familiar to the child, such as spoken language, material artifacts, movement and gesture, are recontextualized into the pedagogic context of the classroom. This

∗ Corresponding author at: Room 610 School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, 135 Xingang Xi Road, Haizhu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510275, China. E-mail address: [email protected] (W.L. Bowcher). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2019.100779 0898-5898/© 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

paper focuses on the resource of gesture as used by teachers in elementary literacy classrooms, and specifically in L1 literacy classes in China, where the teaching and learning of literacy involves learning to read and write Chinese characters, or logograms. Previous research has indicated that teachers’ gestures benefit children’s learning in that children are better able to interpret “task relevant information” (e.g. Goldin-Meadow, 2004, p. 320; see also Goldin-Meadow, Kim, & Singer, 1999). Teachers’ gestures are also effective in conveying required behavior or controlling and directing participation (Allen, 1999). Research from L2 classrooms suggests that comprehension, vocabulary development, and language retrieval capabilities are facilitated by the presence of gestures and other non-verbal forms of behavior by teachers (e.g. Allen, 1999; Harris, 2003; Macedonia & von Kriegstein, 2012; McCafferty & Stam, 2008; Sime, 2008; Tellier, 2008), and this seems to apply also to L1 situations as studies such as McGee and Schickedanz (2007) suggest that pointing and bodily gestures by teachers reading aloud a story to kindergarten and preschoolers support children’s vocabulary and reading comprehension. The focus on the use of gesture in relation to narratives and story-telling in early L1 literacy classes may be because these are somewhat standout activities in such classes. However, at some point in early learning, children need to learn how to read and write the written conventions of their language – how to draw, recognize, combine, say and utilize the letters or symbols of the written code. Competency in the written language is crucial to competency in school

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education as a whole. Nevertheless, little research into the role of teachers’ gestures in this aspect of literacy learning has been conducted. This may be due to a perception that literacy classes are not ‘content’, or that communication between native speakers and teachers is generally seen as unproblematic in this aspect of the curriculum in contrast with L2 classes. Given that teachers’ gestures have been shown to benefit learning across a variety of situations, there seems no reason to assume this would not be the case in learning to read and write the written code in the L1 literacy classroom. Further, as Roth notes, “because teachers . . . make available considerable gestural resources important for understanding a concept, students must attend to gestures as well as to speech to access all the information presented in a lesson . . .and understanding the role and function of gestures in the relationship between teachers and student, therefore, ought to be an important aspect of educational research.” (Roth, 2001, pp. 377–378). The research reported in this paper thus makes an important step toward understanding the role of gesture by teachers in early learning contexts, and specifically when teaching the written code in early literacy classrooms in China, the context of the present research. Our research questions are: what types of gestures are used in teaching elementary literacy, and specifically in teaching children to read and write Chinese characters; how do these gestures relate to the language used by the teachers; how are they distributed throughout the process of teaching children how to read and write; and finally how do they relate to the underlying pedagogy employed by the teacher? The scope of this research is thus concerned with the teachers’ gestures per se, not in terms of their effects on children’s learning, which we see as a follow-up step in this research project. The analytical approach involves two different descriptions of gestures deriving from different theoretical frameworks – McNeill (e.g. 2009) and Hood (2011) – in order to investigate the types of gesture used and their functions, and also to consider how these two descriptions may complement each other. That is, what insights may be gained from applying this combined analytical approach to the analysis of gestures by teachers? Furthermore, since our research falls within the field of literacy education, we are interested in considering the relationship between the use of gesture and the pedagogical approach employed by teachers when teaching children how to read and write. In doing this we turn to the work of Hasan (e.g. 2011) who has critically examined the concept of literacy and its relationship with the wider social environment in which its pedagogy is embedded. Hasan identifies three kinds of literacy pedagogies: ‘recognition literacy’, ‘action literacy’, and ‘reflection literacy’ which we explain later in the paper. Included in our interpretation of our analytical findings, therefore, is reference to the kind of literacy pedagogy being taken by the teachers and the possible reasons, both local and socio-political, which motivate their approach.

2. Gesture in educational contexts Research into the use of gesture in educational contexts has indicated that the use of gesture by teachers supports children’s early language development (Goldin-Meadow, 2004; Kuhn et al., 2014) and may play a role in tracking referents in discourse (Levy & Fowler, 2000), that is, those items that are repeated in discourse often through cohesive devices such as reference and substitution. Referring gestures direct the attention of learners to a particular point or location, whether visible to both teacher and learners, such as pointing to an object in the classroom or a word on the board, or absent, such as a reference to the carpark which is not visible but through pointing in its direction the reference is made clear, or abstract but within the talk itself.

Children entering school for the first time require much support in order to successfully navigate this newly contextualized language-gesture environment and to fully participate and thrive in it. Just as, for instance, adults fronting up at a hospital or an airport need signposts and other referencing resources to assist them in navigating their way to reach their goals and fulfill their purposes, a directionless environment can lead to confusion and frustration. Within a specific classroom, the use of multiple resources for directing students’ attention to salient learning points is a key pedagogical strategy to support learning and facilitate adaptation to this new environment, and gesture constitutes one of these resources. In this regard, previous research suggests that the use of gesture can be beneficial to children’s learning across a number of pedagogical contexts, such in the construction of knowledge and problem solving in subjects such as Math and Science (e.g. Cook, Duffy, & Fenn, 2013; Cook & Goldin-Meadow, 2006; Pozzer-Ardenghi & Roth, 2005; Roth, 2001; Taylor, 2014), and can aid in children’s comprehension and memorization in second language learning and in mother tongue contexts (e.g. Harris, 2003; Kelly, Esch, & McDevitt, 2007; Macedonia & von Kriegstein, 2012; McGee & Schickedanz, 2007; Sime, 2008; Tellier, 2008). Research into L2 acquisition also highlights some of the specific language-gesture relations that may also be relevant in the L1 classroom such as tracking and/or maintaining and/or disambiguating items in discourse through the use of gesture (Gullberg, 2006, 2010). The research reported in this paper focuses on the meaning and types of gestures used by teachers during the initial stages of literacy education within a Chinese educational context, and specifically in classes in which children are learning to read and write Chinese characters. While there may be many similarities between Chinese and other early literacy classrooms, the teaching and learning of Chinese characters involves a complex program of recognition, practice, and breakdown of characters into radicals, strokes, and stroke directions, with some single characters containing more than twenty strokes.1 3. Gesture and the analytical approach used in this study Most scholars from different theoretical paradigms agree that gesture and spoken language are inseparable (Kendon, 1980; Martinec, 2004; McNeill, 2016; Thibault, 2004). There are various ways of categorizing the different kinds of gestures that are used, with perhaps the most significant early work being that of Efron’s (1972 [1941]) description of gestures used by Jewish and Italian groups of people living in the US. Various researchers, such as Martinec (2004) separate out gestures that “can be understood on their own” from those that “co-occur with speech”, the latter which Martinec calls indexical gestures (Martinec, 2004, p. 197). Indexical gestures involve some redundancy in meaning in an interaction, which is typical of texts (and situations) in which multiple modes converge, or “multimodal texts” (Martinec, 2004, p. 197). One of the most prolific researchers into gestures, McNeill (2016, 4ff), argues that gestures “orchestrate” speech, although he is careful to note that this is not a deliberate phenomenon but a natural one. Our analytical method utilizes McNeill’s (2016) categorization of gestures and more recent work on meaning and gesture as developed by Hood (2011). These provide different but complementary

1 Radicals are a means of classifying Chinese characters. While radicals may themselves constitute a character, most characters are built around radicals, in combination with other elements known as phonetics. Radicals are typically situated on the top, bottom or left hand side of a character, but some radicals can appear on the right hand side. For example, the radical ៉ gu˘ang can be seen at the side of the ¯ villa. A stroke is a graphic component of the character, following character zhuang and there are several different types of strokes. The radical ៉ has three strokes and the character has six strokes.

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perspectives on the use of gesture. We describe each of these in turn in the following sections. 3.1. McNeill’s categorisation of gestures McNeill’s model takes a psycholinguistic perspective, which generally focuses on how people process and comprehend communicative resources. From such a perspective language is primarily considered as a cognitive or neurobiological phenomenon which can be studied in terms of its different components such as phonemes, morphemes, and syntactic patterns, with speakers’ intentions and interpretations accessed through studying the context in which utterances are made. Within this framework, McNeill’s work has challenged the notion that speech and gesture are separate phenomena and instead has promoted their combinatorial nature. He proposes that speech and gesture are “synchronous combinations” representing “psycholinguistic ‘growth points”’ – growth points because they represent “the initial form of a thinking-for-speaking unit out of which a dynamic process of utterance and thought organization emerges” (McNeill, 2009, p. 303). McNeill (e.g. 1992) makes use of Kendon’s (e.g. 1988) pioneering work on gesture, which posits a distinction between different kinds of gestures and develops a continuum of gestures according to their relationship with speech and according to how ‘conventionalized’ they are. The continuum captures the idea that although gestures accompany speech, as the need for speech diminishes “idiosyncratic gestures are replaced by socially regulated signs” (McNeill, 1992, p. 37). That is, at one end of the continuum are non-conventional gestures or gesticulations: “idiosyncratic spontaneous movements of the hands and arms accompanying speech”, while at the other end are “signs”, such as sign languages which are “full-fledged linguistic systems” (McNeill, 1992, pp. 37–38). Gestures such as holding up and spreading the index and middle finger to create a ‘V’ to indicate ‘victory’, ‘peace’ or the number ‘2’ depending on the situation, or positioning the thumb upwards to indicate a positive response or attitude to an event or solution are called conventional gestures. Such gestures are typically “culturally specific” and do not necessarily accompany speech (McNeill, 2009, p. 300). At the other end of the scale are the non-conventional gestures commonly known as “gesticulations”. Gesticulations do not have the properties of speech and cannot replace speech as the other gestures along the continuum can do; rather, they are “obligatorily accompanied by speech” (McNeill, 2009, p. 300). Gesticulations, however, appear to be a universal feature in spoken language interaction, carry some of the semantic load (e.g. Beattie & Shovelton, 1999; Holler & Beattie, 2002), and “combine both ‘universal’ and language-specific features” (McNeill, 2009, p. 299). This category of gesture can be subdivided into four types: iconic gestures, metaphoric gestures, deictic gestures, and beats. Iconic gestures give an indication through the shape of the hands or through movement in space of the size or shape of something. Metaphoric gestures are used to indicate abstract ideas or concepts through ‘drawing’ or ‘shaping’ these in some way. For example, moving the hands in the shape of a sphere while speaking about the ‘whole idea’ or the ‘complete sense’ of something would be a metaphoric gesture. Deictic gestures are “pointing movements, which are prototypically performed with the pointing finger, although any extensible object or body part can be used, including the head, nose, or chin, as well as manipulated artifacts” (McNeill, 1992, p. 80). With regard to deictic gestures, there are two types: concrete pointing and abstract pointing. Concrete pointing is a matter of simply extending a finger to direct to something significant and mutually visible, and abstract pointing is pointing when no visible target is present (McNeill, 1998). Beats are often used to emphasize points made in talk. They are typically coordinated with

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the rhythm of the speech and may be repetitive, such as the hammering of a fist on a table while saying the words “just”, “won’t” and “do” in the statement: “I just won’t do it”, and may also be used to reinforce what is being said. With regard to nonconventional gestures, McNeill (2016) points out that these kinds of gestures are inseparable from speech and constitute “the intrinsic imagery of language” (McNeill, 2016, p. 4) One specific area of ‘orchestration’ that McNeill mentions is the use of gesture to introduce and maintain discourse topics (McNeill & Levy, 1993). This cohesive function of gesture is perhaps as important as linguistic cohesive ties, such as the creation of chains of reference through pronouns, ellipsis and substitution (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). The synchrony of interaction between speech and gesture, and more generally, body-language, enables comprehension across varying stretches of text while at the same time it weaves a texture into the interaction. 3.2. Hood’s categorisation of meaning as expressed through gesture Hood’s (2011) model is developed from a social-semiotic perspective and falls within the general domain of the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics. A social semiotic perspective places meaning as the starting point for the study of language and other communicative systems. Hood (2011) describes three main types of gesture: protolinguistic, linguistic, and epilinguistic. She explains that protolinguistic body language does not need speech to be understood as it has more to do with the kinds of postures that denote feelings like discomfort such as fidgeting (Hood, 2011, p. 33). Linguistic gestures are co-speech gestures which synchronize with the phonological patterns of a language, such as salience and tone. Epilinguistic body language accompanies speech but expresses “meanings rather than wordings” (Hood, 2011, p. 34). Hood’s categories are thus sorted somewhat differently from McNeill’s in that epilinguistic body language would largely align with deictic, iconic and metaphoric gestures in McNeill’s classification, and linguistic gestures would correlate somewhat with beats and some pointing gestures. Crucially, Hood’s central focus is on meanings and how and what meanings are conveyed through specific gestures, rather than beginning with the gestures themselves, as is the case with McNeill’s work. Of course, meaning and gesturing go hand in hand, but there is a difference in perspective in each scholar’s work. In her analysis of a face-to-face tertiary teaching situation, Hood (2011) investigates textual (or ‘text-making’) meanings expressed through body language, that is, how body language is used to orchestrate or “integrate” various modalities (whether they be visual or abstract) into the discourse. A key focus of her work is on meanings to do with ‘identification’, which are typically expressed through gestures such as pointing by hand, finger, chin or other parts of the body. Identification may involve self-identifying or identifying an entity away from the speaker-body. Gestures may accompany linguistic reference (identifying) items such as demonstratives (e.g. this, that) or pronouns (e.g. her, you), and may reference entities that are mutually visible, such as those on the blackboard, or which may be absent or abstract, which she calls ‘potential’ referents. Hood develops a network of the different kinds of ‘identification’ meanings of gestures (see Fig. 1). The most primary meanings are those of ‘direction’ and ‘specification’. Within the system of direction, gestures may either point to self or to another or others, and if to others they may point to referents visible to the interactants within the situation (actual) or to those which are outside the situation (potential). Within the system of specification, the choices are ‘particularization’ or ‘delineation’. Particularization has to do with how specific the entity is in the situation to which the speaker is referring. For instance, a teacher may

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Fig. 1. System network for the body language of identification (from Hood, 2011, p. 39). (NB: Curly brackets mean choose this AND that; square brackets mean this OR that).

use a finger to point to a specific word or line of text, or a specific point on a map. There is a cline here from most to least specific in terms of particularization. As for delineation, a body part may be used to map out, mark a boundary between, or ‘delineate’ a portion of text, a group of items or suchlike apart from other text or items. Our analysis uses both McNeill’s and Hood’s categorizations of gestures. With regard to Hood’s model, our focus is on her categorization of identification meanings through gestures – those mostly expressed through hand and arm movements – as this more closely complements McNeill’s model which also focuses primarily on hand and arm movements. Identification is largely expressed through ‘pointing’ gestures, or “deictic gestures” (to use McNeill’s term). Identification plays a textual role in discourse in that one of the key functions of identification is to bring ‘things’ into the discourse, whether these be abstract, material, locational, directional, whether within the mutually available visible context, or outside of it. By exploring the meaning of ‘identification’ through gesture in the context of the literacy classrooms, we can obtain a fairly finegrained analysis of the different identification meanings chosen by the teacher and those which are not chosen, and how a range of things and their features are integrated into the discourse primarily through types of ‘pointing’. Further, Hood’s network can provide a systematic description of the functions of the types of identification gestures which occur in each teacher’s discourse. While the analysis considers the data from both the perspective of the gestures themselves (McNeill’s categorization) and the meanings and roles that gestures play in conveying those meanings (Hood’s categorization), how these gestures and meanings are distributed is of particular import in order to better understand how gestures are meaningfully incorporated into the teaching/learning environment of the Chinese early literacy classroom. An important clarification needs to be made at this point. In our analysis, we limit gestures to those primarily enacted through arm and hand movements during the communication of content, ideas, activities, or actions associated with the pedagogical process of literacy teaching (cf. Wilson, Boatright, & Landon-Heys, 2014). The discussion section brings McNeill’s and Hood’s frameworks together to interpret the use of gestures in the elementary literacy classrooms in terms of the research questions underlying this paper. 4. Data The context for our research is L1 literacy classes in China, where literacy involves learning to read and write Chinese characters, or logograms. How such lessons may differ from literacy classes in which alphabetic or syllabic scripts are taught, is not within the scope of this paper, but the paper does lay the basis for such a comparative study. One major difference between our classrooms and those studied in previous research is the ratio of teachers to students. The previous classroom-based research on gestures in L1 classrooms is typically conducted in western educational contexts

and typically involves a very low ratio of teachers and students, with some studies focusing on individual one-on-one situations. This is not the case in our study where elementary literacy classes have one teacher in front of a class of from at least 42 up to 59 children. We mention this in our discussion of pedagogical approach as it appears to have some bearing on the choice of pedagogy and the use of gestures. The data derive from the observation of two literacy classrooms. Because of the small sample size, we do not claim that these classrooms represent all classrooms in China, but they do give a glimpse into the situation of elementary classrooms across China. Various types of data were gathered for the current study, ranging from video recordings of the lessons, textbooks, observational field notes, content on the blackboard and/or PowerPoint display, but for the analysis in this paper, the primary data are video recordings of two teachers conducting a literacy lesson. Both classes were Grade 1, one from a large city and the other from a small town in southern China. The purpose for choosing these two classrooms was not to characterize the differences between city and small town classes, but to provide a basic degree of variation in situational setting and in ‘gesturer’ for our database. The lesson in each classroom lasts eighty minutes, with a ten-minute break in the middle, although, as already mentioned, our analysis focuses on the specific parts of the lesson primarily devoted to teaching reading and writing (rather than, say, introducing the lesson). A video camera was placed in the back of each classroom from where each teacher’s movements could be easily recorded with least disruption to the class. Although the classroom locations differed, they bear both similarities and differences. Both teachers were women and have been teaching for several years. The student body comprised both boys and girls, all of Chinese background, around the ages of 6–7 years old and in the first year of school. Both classrooms were arranged in traditional Chinese style, with 42 children in the city school and 59 children in the town school seated in rows and facing the teacher who stands at the front of the classroom and ‘lectures’ from a raised platform. The main difference between the two classrooms is that the city classroom had a PowerPoint display board and blackboard, whereas the small town classroom had only a blackboard. As both schools use the same course textbook chosen from the few recommended and approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education, we selected the class times in which the same topic was the focus of each lesson in order to provide a further point of comparison. The lesson topic centered on a reading text “Which building is the most beautiful” ( na zuo fangzi zui piaoliang) with segments of the lesson focusing on teaching and practicing the writing of new characters as well as recognizing the form, structure and pronunciation of a small set of Chinese characters, with both teachers spending considerable time on this latter aspect of the lesson. Teaching and practicing reading and writing Chinese characters constitute the ‘reading and writing’ portions of the lessons, and our analysis focuses on the gestures used in these parts of the lesson. The reading sections of the class centered on ‘recognizing and reading characters’, ‘forming phrases’ and ‘reading texts’. The writing sections of the class involved ‘writing strokes,’ ‘writing characters’ and reading the characters that the children were learning to write. We label this last subcategory W-reading to distinguish it from the reading section of the lesson because it involved both reading and writing specific characters. Our database thus consists of an inventory of gestures used by two teachers during these portions of their lessons. It is important to note that while gestures are part of continuous bodily movement, like words in continuous spoken discourse, particular gestures have been identified as discrete entities by various researchers. We follow the descriptions of gestures as presented by McNeill (e.g. 1992, 2016 and Hood (2011) as we utilize the ana-

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Fig. 2. Examples of gestures using McNeill’s categories.

lytical frameworks developed by these researchers as described in Section 3 of this paper. 5. Analysis The first part of the analysis relates to our first few research questions: What types of gestures are used in teaching elementary literacy, and specifically in teaching children to read and write Chinese characters? Our analysis first focuses on identifying the types of gestures2 that the teachers use during the reading and writing stages of the lesson using McNeill’s categories. We then focus on identifying the meanings that gestures convey using Hood’s framework. We illustrate the teachers’ gestures through drawings (see Figs. 2 and 3). It is important to note that the representation of some gestures by a 2-dimensional static drawing cannot convey the movement or flow of a gesture. The drawings are simply illustrative references to the key feature of the gesture. After the description of the gestures, we discuss the frequency of gestures used in Section 6.3 While this move is typical of quantitative work, we find this approach to the data useful for making qualitative judgments and

2 In order to achieve inter-rater reliability, the categorization of the gestures was checked by supplying a subset of about 30% of our analytical findings to a third person for checking and verifying. Inter-rater reliability was almost 100% with only one gesture being disputed. 3 For the frequency analysis, only the speech-accompanying gestures were counted. In the lessons being recorded, the analysis shows that most of the time only one gesture occurs at a time, and the co-occurrence of gestures happened very

interpretations about the use of gestures and in helping to frame answers to our research questions.

5.1. Types of gestures (McNeill’s categories) Fig. 2 presents examples of the different gesture types identified by McNeill and used by the teachers in our study along with a sample of the speech accompanying such gesture types.

5.1.1. Deictic gestures Deictic gestures are pointing gestures. Fig. 2 shows a teacher performing a pointing gesture as she points her index finger to the character zui ‘most’ on the blackboard while she asks, “Do you know how to read (say) this (character)?” Both teachers use deictic gestures to point to specific characters or character radicals. For instance, on another occasion a teacher points her index finger to the radical ៉ guang from the character zuo and explains, “In the character zuo, the radical component above is guang”.

rarely and was only restricted to the co-occurrence of deictic gesture and beat. For example, in one situation T1 is asking students to read the characters from the character-reading cards that students have, but some students leave their cards at home. Here the teacher says “those who do not have the character-reading card can only read from their textbooks”, and when she says this she points to the students and beats following the rhythm of the speech. Here the deictic gesture and beat are both counted and enter the analysis as two separate gestures.

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Fig. 3. Examples of meanings conveyed through gestures using Hood’s framework.

5.1.2. Iconic gestures An iconic gesture “bears a close formal relationship to the semantic content of speech” (McNeill, 1992, p. 78). In iconic gestures, gesture and speech typically present the same or part of the same thing. Fig. 2 shows an example of a teacher performing an iconic gesture. As the teacher is asking the students whether they want to answer the question or whether the students know how to read (pronounce) a character, they raise their hands. While this gesture is not specifically about the same “semantic content” of what is being said, it is conveying a specific intended meaning attached to the utterance. That is, it indicates a typical classroom behavior—students typically raise hands when they answer or ask a question. In so doing, the teacher is indicating the expected gestural behavior of the students through the use of this iconic gesture. 5.1.3. Metaphoric gestures Metaphoric gestures present imagery, but the image depicted represents or stands for abstract concepts such as knowledge and

relations (Kendon, 2004, p. 100). Fig. 2 shows an example of a metaphoric gesture. Here the teacher is asking the students about the ‘one pair’ of antonyms in the reading. The numeral ‘one’ is used before the noun ‘pair’. So the numeral is echoed in the teacher’s gesture of holding up one finger.

5.1.4. Beats Beats are “hand flicks” and “do not present a discernible meaning” (McNeill, 1992, p. 80), but instead align with the beat (rhythm) of what is being said. Beats are found in only one of the teacher’s repertoire of gestures, which may or may not be significant if further research is conducted in this area. Fig. 2 shows an example of a beat performed by the teacher. Here the teacher is moving her hand in time with saying the vowels a, o, e, i, and u. The beat gesture is used to emphasize her speech but does not reflect, provide, or add any semantic content.

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Table 1 Possible choices in Hood’s network showing the ‘realization statements’.

Identification:

Choice 1 Choice 2 Choice 3 Choice 4 Choice 5 Choice 6 Choice 7 Choice 8 Choice 9 Choice 10 Choice 11 Choice 12

[direction:self/specification:particularization:+surface size of point/delineation:2 fingers (etc.)] [direction:self/specification:particularization:−surface size of point/delineation:2 fingers (etc.)] [direction:self/specification:particularization:+surface size of point/delineation:ø] [direction:self/specification:particularization:−surface size of point/delineation:ø] [direction:others:actual/specification:particularization:+surface size of point/delineation:2 fingers (etc.)] [direction:others:actual/specification:particularization:−surface size of point/delineation:2 fingers (etc.)] [direction:others:actual/specification:particularization:+surface size of point/delineation:ø] [direction:others:actual/specification:particularization:−surface size of point/delineation:ø] [direction:others:potential/specification:particularization:+surface size of point/delineation:2 fingers (etc.)] [direction:others:potential/specification:particularization:−surface size of point/delineation:2 fingers (etc.)] [direction:others:potential/specification:particularization:+surface size of point/delineation: ø] [direction:others:potential/specification:particularization:−surface size of point/delineation: ø]

The right-hand column shows ‘realization statements’. These account for the choices made within a network. A colon indicates a choice within a specific network; choices following a forward slash are simultaneous with those that have been made immediately before. Realization statements are typically enclosed within square brackets (see Huddleston, 1981 for a full explanation and description of ‘realization statement’).

5.2. Meanings conveyed through gestures in the classroom (Hood’s framework)

T2 uses a stick to direct students’ attention to a window in the classroom when she is referring to ‘window’.

In this section we focus on Hood’s (2011) categories to analyze the gestures used by the teachers. Hood’s (2011) system of Identification focuses on the gestures and body language that play a role in ‘identifying’ referents in the talk and ‘introducing’ elements into the discourse. The two simultaneous choices within this system are ‘direction’ and ‘specification’. Within direction there are two choices: ‘self’ or ‘others’. Specification leads to two simultaneous subsystems of ‘particularization’ and ‘delineation’ (see Fig. 1). A possible set of choices within this system might account for a person pointing to themselves and at the same time specifying a certain part of the body (particularization), such as eyes, hands, or stomach. Table 1 outlines the possible choices in Hood’s network using ‘realization statements’ (explained at the bottom of Table 1). The analysis finds that each teacher chooses gestures for 5 out of these 12 possible choices of meanings: Choices 6–8, 11 and 12. Fig. 3 illustrates the meanings conveyed through the gestures used by the teachers, showing the ‘choices’ corresponding with those in Table 1. The next few paragraphs describe these five types of meanings using examples from our database before presenting and discussing our analytical findings.

5.2.4. Particularization of potential referent (other) The fourth row of Fig. 3 shows an example of T1 using a gesture to particularize with a degree of specificity, but in this case, the teacher makes use of her index finger to point to a potential location in the character format when she explains to students the particular way a stroke should be written (Choice 11). The degree of specificity realized through the gesture is relatively high, and guides the students to a more precise feature of the writing that they will be doing, but it is a potential referent because nothing has yet been written there.

5.2.1. Delineation – fingers marking boundaries Delineation is the marking out of an area or boundary of something. Both teachers make use of their thumb and index finger to delineate the space that a part of a character or character stroke should occupy in relation to other parts of the character. Fig. 3 (top row) shows an example of delineation. This teacher (T1) is telling students that the upper part of the character “ ” occupies half of the format area and her gesture aids in delineating the boundary of the upper part of this stroke. 5.2.2. Particularization of actual referent (other) The second row of Fig. 3 shows the way particularization is realized with actual referents. Here the teacher (T2) points to a ‘dot’ in the upper left part of the format box, which is the first stroke in writing the character “ ” men, ‘door’. The dot indicates where the first stroke should be. In a similar way as we see in Choice 11, the teacher here continues to guide students to attend to more specific details involved in writing. 5.2.3. Actual others The cases of delineation and particularization (Choices 6 and 7) just mentioned both involve actual others. Choice 8 is a more general case of referring to ‘actual others’. In the third row of Fig. 3 we see an example of gesturing to refer to ‘actual others’ when

5.2.5. Potential others When the teacher wishes to identify a potential object, she may use a variety of gestures. In the bottom row of Fig. 3 we see T1 using her outstretched arm and pointed finger to indicate a potential location ‘away’ from her and ‘away’ from the students when she is explaining the difference between two very similar-looking and sounding characters “ ” nà ‘that’ and “ ” nˇa ‘which’. Specifically her gesture plays a role in directing the pupils’ attention to a potential location: ‘that (place)’. On a different occasion, T2 (not shown in the figure) uses both hands to direct the pupils to a potential location behind her to help explain the concept attached to the character hòu, ‘back/behind’. These are considered ‘potential’, as the pointing is ‘in the direction of’ but not exactly ‘at’ the objects or places indicated, or toward objects and places not visible to the teachers or students. 6. Results 6.1. The frequency of gestures used by each teacher (McNeill’s categories) Table 2 indicates that although there are some variations in the results for each teacher, deictic gestures are the most frequent gestures used by both teachers, with T2 using more deictic gestures overall than T1 (75.86% and 66.37% respectively). Both teachers also show a similar frequency of iconic gestures, but in this case T1’s percentage is slightly higher. With regard to metaphorical gestures, T2 uses about one third of the frequency of metaphoric gestures in comparison with T1, although overall, both teachers use very few metaphoric gestures. Due to our small sample size, the results are only indicative and differences cannot be treated as significant. Showing the overall frequency of gesture types gives little information about the distribution of the gestures across the lessons, which relates to our second research question: How are gestures distributed throughout the process of teaching children how to read

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Table 2 Frequency of types of gestures used by T1 and T2 across both the reading and writing stages of the lesson. Teachers

Types of gestures Deictic

T1 T2 Combined Totals

Iconic

Metaphoric

Beat

Total

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

223 264 487

66.37% 75.86% 71.20%

91 79 170

27.08% 22.70% 24.85%

16 5 21

4.76% 1.44% 3.07%

6 0 6

1.79% 0.00% 0.88%

336 348 684

100.00% 100.00% 100.00%

Table 3 Frequency and types of gestures used by T1 and T2 in the reading and writing stages. Teaching stages

Teachers

Types of gestures Deictic

Metaphoric

Beat

No.

%

Iconic No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

Total No.

%

Reading stages

T1 T2 Combined Totals

206 148 354

72.53% 76.69% 74.21%

65 41 106

22.89% 21.24% 22.22%

8 4 12

2.82% 2.07% 2.52%

5 0 5

1.76% 0.00% 1.05%

284 193 477

100.00% 100.00% 100.00%

Writing stages

T1 T2 Combined Totals

17 116 133

32.69% 74.84% 64.25%

26 38 64

50.00% 24.52% 30.92%

8 1 9

15.39% 0.65% 4.35%

1 0 1

1.92% 0.00% 0.48%

52 155 207

100.00% 100.00% 100.00%

and write? In order to get a clearer picture of the distribution of certain types of gestures, we need to look more closely at the different parts of the lessons. Table 3 shows the frequency and type of gestures used in the reading characters stages of the lesson (upper part of the table) and in the writing characters stages (lower part of the table). Table 3 indicates that deictic gestures are the most frequent gestures for both teachers in the reading stages of the lesson. For iconic gestures and metaphoric gestures the frequency counts for both teachers are similar in the reading stages. However, this picture changes in the writing stages of the lesson. Here we can see that for T2, the percentage of deictic gestures is similar to that in the reading stages, but for T1, the frequency of her use of deictic gestures (32.69%) is lower than that of iconic (50.00%) gestures but just over double that of metaphoric (15.39%). For T2 the percentage of iconic gestures in the writing stages is similar to that for the reading stages, but the results show that T2 uses half the proportion of iconic gestures than T1, at 24.52% and 50.00% respectively. Further, looking at the raw data, overall, the number of gestures used by T1 is far less than T2 in the writing stages, at about one third of the number of gestures used by T2, but higher than T2 in the reading stages, at just over two-thirds of the number of gestures used. In order to consider these results in more detail, we reviewed the video data and found that iconic gestures are used by the teachers in two key situations: managing certain classroom activities like reminding students to sit up straight or asking students to answer questions by raising their hand, or writing (shaping out) characters or strokes in the air. Specifically, in the writing stages, T1 uses 14 iconic gestures for writing strokes and characters in the air out of the 25 iconic gestures (excluding one gesture for W-reading), or 56% of the iconic gestures in this category with the remaining gestures being used for managing classroom activities; T2 uses 16 iconic gestures for writing strokes and characters in the air out of the 27 iconic gestures (excluding 11 gestures for W-reading), or 59% of the iconic gestures in this category with the remaining being used for managing classroom activities. So in fact, there appears to be a reasonable degree of parity in these two uses of the iconic gestures during the writing stages of the lesson (56% and 59%). The results also suggest a difference in the use of metaphoric gestures by the two teachers in the writing stages. This difference comes about because T1 uses fingers to represent numbers in the process of writing. For instance, she holds up her index finger to

represent the number one when she requires students to look at the first character. At other times she explains certain writing concepts through metaphoric gestures, for example, T1 opens her arms to both sides to represent the concept ‘big’. T2 only uses a metaphoric gesture once to represent ‘first’ when she refers to the first stroke (the stroke pie) of the character (yue moon). This finding most likely reflects individual differences in the lessons we observed. Further research would be needed to ascertain any significance. In the writing stages, we see that there is considerable difference between the frequency of deictic gestures, with T2’s percentage of deictic gestures being more than twice that of T1’s (74.84% and 32.69% respectively, see Table 3). However, this difference can be explained if we look more closely at the different categories of the writing stages and how the gestures are distributed in these stages. Recall that the writing stages were divided into three categories: writing individual strokes, writing characters, and Wreading (reading characters that are being written down). We find that T2 uses a lot more gestures overall than T1, and that she uses a higher proportion of gestures during the W-reading stage than T1. However, both teachers use fewer gestures overall during the W-reading stages than in the writing strokes and characters stages. When checking the recordings, we find that T2 actually spends a greater amount of time on W-reading as a proportion of all the writing stages than T1, which leads to her using more gestures than T1 in this stage. Were T1 to spend the same amount of time in Wreading, it is likely that her number of gestures in this stage of the lesson would be very close to that of T2’s. When the W-reading stage is disregarded, the results for each teacher are very similar with regard to the use of deictic gestures in the writing stages. Thus, this cannot be considered a significant difference in the results, as it is likely that T1 may spend as much time as T2 on W-reading at another time. The results so far have indicated the prevalence and distribution of certain types of gestures according to McNeill’s categories. The next section presents the results arising from applying Hood’s framework to the dataset. In Section 7 we compare both sets of results. 6.2. Results of the application of Hood’s framework As noted already, both teachers use gestures for the same five choices in the system of identification out of the twelve possible

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Table 4 Frequency of identification meanings made through gestures by T1 and T2 using Hood’s network. Teacher

T1 T2 Combined Totals

Choice Choice 6 (actual referent)

Choice 7 (actual referent)

Choice 8 (actual referent)

Choice 11 (potential referent)

Choice 12 (potential referent)

Totals

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

2 5 7

0.90% 1.89% 1.44%

5 15 20

2.24% 5.68% 4.11%

211 239 450

94.62% 90.53% 92.40%

1 2 3

0.45% 0.76% 0.62%

4 3 7

1.79% 1.14% 1.44%

223 264 487

100% 100% 100%

Table 5 Meaning-choices conveyed through gestures using Hood’s categories in both the reading and writing stages of the lessons. Teaching stages

Teacher

Choice Choice 6

Choice 7

Choice 8

Choice 11

Choice 12

Total

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

Reading stages

T1 T2 Combined Totals

0 0 0

0.00% 0.00% 0.00%

0 0 0

0.00% 0.00% 0.00%

201 146 347

98.05% 98.65% 98.30%

0 0 0

0.00% 0.00% 0.00%

4 2 6

1.95% 1.35% 1.70%

205 148 353

100.00% 100.00% 100.00%

Writing stages

T1 T2 Combined Totals

2 5 7

11.11% 4.31% 5.22%

5 15 20

27.78% 12.93% 14.93%

10 93 103

55.55% 80.17% 76.87%

1 2 3

5.56% 1.73% 2.24%

0 1 1

0.00% 0.86% 0.74%

18 116 134

100.00% 100.00% 100.00%

types in Hood’s network (see Table 1 and Section 5.2). The frequency of these choices is shown in Table 4. The choices convey meanings that are in some way connected with identifying or referencing ‘others’, and are typically used when the teachers are asking students to answer questions, or when the teachers are identifying written characters and other objects that help explain the characters. Table 4 shows that by far the most common identification meaning is when the teachers are referring to ‘actual’ referents (Choices 6, 7 and 8). For T1 this constituted 97.76% of her gestural meanings while for T2 it was 98.10%. Meanings to do with potential referents account for only 2.24% and 1.90% respectively. The meaning of ‘actual referent’ is conveyed almost entirely through ‘concrete pointing’, thus supporting the finding for McNeill’s categories where concrete pointing was actually the most common type of deictic gesture. As for delineation and particularization (Choices 6, 7 and 11), the teachers utilized gestures to convey these kinds of meanings for a total of 3.59% and 8.33% in T1’s classroom and T2’s classroom respectively, and for both teachers exclusively in the writing portions of the lesson (see Table 5).

7. Discussion of the results 7.1. Summary of the results Overall, in the writing stages, both teachers use more gestures when teaching how to write strokes and characters than in Wreading (reading the strokes while writing them), and although there are some differences between the teachers’ use of gestures, both teachers use deictic and iconic gestures to draw attention to specific features of the characters, the correct placement of strokes in relation to others, and specifically iconic gestures to demonstrate through writing in the air the shape of the characters. Iconic gestures are also used when asking students to raise their hands if they have finished writing certain characters or strokes. In terms of the kinds of textual meanings conveyed through the gestures, in both the reading and the writing stages of the lesson, both teachers overwhelmingly conveyed meanings to do with referring (pointing) to ‘actual’ others, with Choice 8 (identification through direction to actual others but not necessarily discretely specified through particularization or delineation) being the most

common choice. Reference to actual others through delineation or particularization (Choices 6 and 7) were exclusively used in the writing stages, although they were not as frequent as Choice 8 in the writing stages (see Table 5). Using gestures to convey delineation and particularization was a way to direct students to some of the finer points with regard to the correct way of writing radicals and Chinese characters.

7.2. The complementarity of the approaches and the results Part of our objective in using two approaches was to find out how these two descriptions might complement each other, and what insights might be gained from applying this combined analytical approach to the analysis of gestures by teachers. It is clear from Hood’s description that identification meanings are primarily done through pointing gestures, and this was borne out in our study. However, whereas the analysis using McNeill’s framework enabled us to describe the number of deictic gestures and in which parts of the lesson these were most frequently used, Hood’s framework allowed us to categorize what was being done with the pointing in a systematic way and to discover not only which meanings were chosen but which were not chosen to be conveyed by deictic gestures. Identification is generally a means of pointing in order to bring into the discourse certain abstract, potential or actual elements, and in our classrooms, the most common things brought into the discourse of teaching and learning Chinese characters were objects or places within the mutually visible environment of the teachers and the pupils, whether those objects were part of the material environment or features of the characters themselves. This was a means of making the learning of the symbolic writing system very concrete for the children. Looking at the choices NOT made by the teachers, we see that such choices largely involved pointing to ‘self’. This pattern suggests an avoidance of talking about the teacher’s own experience but rather placing the focus on the object of study itself, the characters and their features and objects and locations in the room that gave a concrete meaning to the characters being referred to. What becomes clear here is that Hood’s framework could well be extended to include meanings that may be conveyed by other gestures. For instance, the results using McNeill’s categories showed

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that iconic gestures were often used for drawing characters in the air, or for showing how children should sit or raise their hands to answer questions. These latter gestures also play a textual role, particularly the gestures concerning sitting up straight, in that they are punctuating the content focus of the lesson with a brief management focus. These meanings reflect the situation in which they are deployed, and this is an important factor when considering the type and function of gestures. In this regard, it is worth considering Holler and Beattie’s (e.g. 2003) work on iconic gestures. Building on McNeill’s work, and on previous work by Beattie and Shovelton (e.g. 1999), Holler and Beattie (2003) develop a detailed categorization of the kind of semantic information conveyed by iconic gestures and their relationship with the semantic content of the speech taking place at the time, as well as a means of coding this relationship. Their database derives largely from narratives of a cartoon story and their categories include such things as: Action, Position, Size and Shape of an object or instrument or agent, with subcategories of each of these. Such descriptive categories fit well with telling a story, but the iconic gestures used by the teachers in the current study were part of instructing and showing. While these gestures are a kind of ‘action’, their function is rather different from the action-type iconic gestures described by Holler and Beattie (2003). Holler and Beattie categorized the gestures in rather material terms, e.g. “Action: direction – This category refers to information about the direction of the movement that is critical with regard to the event” (Holler & Beattie, 2003, p. 90). In our study, for instance, in the case of drawing characters in the air, the ‘actions’ played a key role in instructing the children in how to write, and in the case of the ‘hands up’ or demonstration of how to sit up straight, on how children should behave. This suggests that analysis of gestures in a variety of discourse situations is needed in order to understand not just the material features of the gestures, but their function in relation to the kind of discourse taking place. A network such as Hood’s could be developed to show the various types of meanings conveyed by iconic gestures, and analysis of different situations would reveal which meanings and gestures were chosen and which were not. This would represent an important step toward building up a description of the functions and meanings of iconic gestures within different discourse types. 7.3. Gestures, language and pedagogy Our other research questions concern the relationship between gestures and language, and between gestures and the guiding pedagogy employed by the teacher. There are two main aspects to the language used in the literacy classroom. The first is the written language as the object of study, and the second is the language used by the teacher in teaching. With regard to the written language as the object of study, there are various ways in which gestures relate to this. The deictic gestures point to various features of the characters, as do gestures which delineate and particularize features of the Chinese characters. These gestures reflect the teachers’ attention to the peculiarities of the characters, and pedagogically, to the requirements of the Chinese Curriculum Standards of Compulsory Education (2015), which advise teachers to ensure that pupils in Year 1 and 2 develop good writing habits so that they produce ‘standard’, ‘correct’ and ‘neat’ Chinese characters. One pedagogical tool used to facilitate this is character ‘formats’—boxes that serve as boundaries and reference points for writing characters and for ensuring that strokes are in the appropriate proportion and position in relation to other strokes in the characters. When teachers teach, they also use character formats in order to ‘pinpoint’ the position of the strokes and the particular way the strokes are related in the format. Teachers therefore delineate and particularize through both language and at times through gesture, the peculiarities of certain characters. Such moments are readily identified in the lesson: e.g.,

Fig. 4. The writing exercise for the four characters focused on in the lesson in the present study (from Yuwen (Volume 1 Grade 1) 2003, p. 68).

/The upper part of “ ” occupies half of the square (see top row in Fig. 3). There were, however, relatively few examples of gestures used to delineate and particularize in our classrooms, and this may be because the focus of these early literacy classes is more on recognition (reading) than on writing characters. It may also be because detailed features are picked up through other pedagogical resources, such as the textbook materials which include sets of format boxes in which the children are required to practice writing the characters (see Fig. 4). It is likely that the oral explanation of these features largely scaffolds other pedagogical tools. Future research is needed to consider this issue in more detail. The results indicated that there was a difference in the frequency of gestures used by T1 and T2 during the W-reading stages, largely due to the amount of time that each teacher spent on this kind of activity. This difference may reflect different pedagogical emphases by the two teachers and may reflect a subtle difference in the way each teacher interprets her role in fulfilling the guidelines of the curriculum standards in this particular lesson. That is, in the process of teaching how to write Chinese characters, T1 in this lesson mainly concentrates on the writing of strokes and whole characters, while T2 focuses on these aspects of writing but also on reading the characters as they are being written (W-reading). For example, in teaching the character le, T1 teaches students how to write le, while T2 teaches how to write le with the added focus on how to read it when writing it, suggesting a very concrete elementary form of active learning where reading and writing skills consolidate each other – form, writing and sound simultaneously come into focus in T2’s teaching methodology. The Chinese Curriculum Standards of Compulsory Education (2015) suggest that the number of characters that pupils in the lower grades (Grade 1 and 2) in elementary school need to recognize to be competent readers is greater than the number of characters they are required to learn to write during the same years of schooling (1600 ∼ 1800 and 800 ∼ 1000 respectively). Thus, character recognition in relation to reading, and developing fluency in reading are the main teaching aims for Year 1 (the first year of elementary schooling). In our classroom data, the reading portions of the lesson took more time than the writing parts; the number of characters the students were being taught to recognize was 12, while those they were taught to write were 4. On the whole, both teachers spent more time on teaching character recognition (reading), which is reflected in the higher frequency of gestures used during the reading stages for both teachers. The results also suggest that teaching strategies are consistent with the requirement in the Curriculum Standards. Throughout the reading portions of the lessons, deictic gestures were the most frequent, and referring to ‘actual’ others was the most prominent meaning conveyed through such gestures, which directly relates to the emphasis on character

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recognition – teachers frequently pointed to the characters (the ‘actual others’) on the board or the screen as the lesson progressed. The emphasis on character recognition in both the curriculum guidelines and supported through the use and meaning of the teachers’ gestures warrants some discussion. According to McNeill (1992), concrete pointing is one of the first gestures to develop in children; while abstract pointing develops at about age ten to indicate an abstract or a non-present referent. This claim supports established ideas about the general flow of both cognitive and linguistic development in children, that is from reference to and understanding of the concrete and immediately visible to an ability to handle the unseen and abstract (see e.g. Halliday, 2016; Piaget, 2001). The use of concrete pointing to reference actual others by the teachers during the literacy lesson, and particularly during the reading portions of the lesson, reflects the attention to the hereand-now of the lesson material – the concreteness of both the lesson material, the language of the teachers, and the activities that are taking place. That is, the analysis shows that concrete gestures such as concrete pointing and referring to ‘actual’ others are typically used by teachers to draw students’ attention to things that are within the mutually visible environment of the classroom, such as the characters written on the board as well as attributes of the characters and of the objects the characters stand for. This is exemplified in the first row of Fig. 2 where the teacher points to a character written on the board zui ‘most’ and asks the question: “Do you know how to read (say) this (character)?” ? This gesture-speech-image (visual environment) pedagogical context is appropriate not only to the children’s stage of cognitive development and the language that is being used, but also to the visible material context in which the teachers are operating. It also exemplifies a particular type of literacy pedagogy known as ‘recognition literacy’ (Hasan, 2011). 7.4. Gestures and recognition literacy pedagogy The underlying pedagogical position held by the teachers was to focus on “language as expression” and “the correspondence between orthography and phonology” or the “sound-shape correspondence” (Hasan, 2011, p. 178). These constitute the basic definition of recognition literacy and represent an important step in the development of literacy competence. In the textbook lesson covered in our data, there were 12 characters that the students needed to learn to recognize. Recognition of characters is extremely important in Chinese as the skill of recognizing characters makes it possible to read longer passages and familiarizes children with the written shapes and features that they will encounter in their everyday lives and in their school life. However, the characters learned in the lesson do not display any particular pattern or meaningful connection amongst themselves; rather their connection lies in the semantic concepts or items they represent within a reading passage for the lesson, and all of the targeted characters for recognition have been encountered in previous passages in the textbook but read primarily through reference to their pinyin or romanized form.4 Once the characters become a part of the reading portion of the lesson, they are focused on in terms of their sound-shape correspondence and their recognizable features. Capturing the semantic complexity of written texts and their components is not a focus in recognition literacy nor was it the focus in the classrooms that we observed. The choice by teachers to use a recognition literacy approach was a means of accomplishing the requirements of the Chinese Curricu-

4 Pinyin, or Han Pinyin is a standardized method of writing Chinese characters in romanized letters. Typically, a diacritic is placed above the vowel to show the ¯ má, m˘a and mà. A different tone indicates a different tone shape. For example, ma, meaning.

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lum Standards which involves building a store of characters. In fact, levels of literacy are typically defined according to the number of Chinese characters that a person can recognize and write. For example, in the first two years of school, children are expected learn to recognize 1,600 ∼ 1800 characters, and write 800 ∼ 1000 (Chinese Curriculum Standards). Although children are adept meaning-makers and meaningexchangers before they start school, once they enter the school, they are suddenly faced with a new semiotic system – one that is still language, but not of a type they are used to. Learning the form and sounds associated with the written language creates a very concrete pedagogical focus, and this is reinforced by the fact that many of the new characters for recognition refer to concrete objects or concepts found in the reading passage, and are also close to the child’s experience and readily referenced through concrete examples: zuò ‘seat’,5 fáng ‘house/building’, piào, liàng, which together make piàoliàng (a word which means beautiful), q¯ıng ‘green’. Concrete pointing gestures and referring through gestures to actual others, whether they be the characters themselves or extrinsic attributes related to the objects or places within the mutually visible environment of the classroom, reflect the focus on concrete knowledge in line with the perceived cognitive level of the students (cf. Caramelli, Setti, & Maurizzi, 2004) and the goals of recognition literacy. Literacy is about becoming conscious of the language one speaks and hears in an entirely different way, a way that connects what the child already knows to an entirely new semiotic form; and in a context quite unlike the ‘taken-for-granted’ learning context of spoken language. However, the limits of recognition literacy with regard to reading for meaning and to producing a ‘meaningful reading’ become clear when listening to the children recite reading passages. The recitation is often done in an almost mechanical way. Reading is a kind of display, or as Davies (2014) has said, a form of ‘barking at print’. It would amount to one being able to ‘read’ (or more accurately say) a string of words with little recognition of how or why this string of words means what it does. This kind of ‘reading’ is reflected in questions such as, “Do you know how to read (say) this (character)?” (see Fig. 2 top row). This is not to say that the children do not understand the meaning of what they are reading, but the reading exercises are not particularly for the meaning of the passage, but for the correct form-sound correspondence. Moreover, at least from our observation of these two classes, little emphasis was placed on the semantic consequences of producing ill-formed characters, except that they are simply not ‘standard’. The gestures that directed students to the characters on the board and to ‘say’ their corresponding sound were invariably concrete pointing gestures, thus tying the teacher’s gestures in to the pedagogical approach, the content of the lesson, and the language of the classroom. The teaching situation itself may also motivate the observed combination of gesture, language and pedagogical approach. Recall that the classrooms are arranged in a traditional style with more than 40 children (59 children in the town school) seated in rows of desks all facing a teacher who stands on a raised platform at the front of the classroom. This kind of teaching situation, while reasonably cost-effective in that few materials are needed, literally leaves little space for maneuverability and change, and hence does not lend itself to much creativity or risky ambiguity, particularly when it is the teacher’s sole duty to manage the classroom, keep children on track with the required lesson objectives, and ensure that the children maintain a focus on what she is doing at the front of the room. The use of deictic gestures, and particularly concrete

5

zuo here functions as a classifier/measure for ‘house/building’.

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pointing, reflect this situation. By directing students’ attention to that which is mutually visible, the teacher does not need to check for individual student’s understanding of a concept or abstract idea, and indeed, it would be very difficult to do so. This is quite different from the situations in which previous studies of gestures in early learning have been conducted where there was a small pupil to teacher ratio. In large classrooms as those in our study, students situated at the back of the room can become accustomed to the purpose of the pointing as being a direction to concrete, visible phenomena. Furthermore, with regard to the iconic gestures, those in which the teachers are drawing the characters in the air are a visible means of modeling for all students in the classroom the shape of the movement of the hands as characters are drawn in large form – larger than would be possible if written or shown on the board or screen. It is also a way for the teacher to remain engaged in face-to-face contact with the class while she is teaching without having to face the board to draw the characters, and hence lose sight of what is going on in the classroom. Moreover, iconic gestures such as those replicating the raised hand for asking or answering questions or for folding arms on top of desks are directly related to the activities and flow of the classroom, and assist in acculturating the children to the visible behavioral requirements of the school and the objectives of the lesson.

8. Conclusion and implications of this study This paper has presented a case study investigation wherein the analysis and discussion of the use of gestures in first-year elementary literacy (yuwen) classrooms in China brought together two different perspectives on gestures: McNeill’s (1992, 2016 classification of gestures and Hood’s (2011) framework for meanings realized by gestures. Although the data-set was limited to two teachers each teaching a single lesson on literacy, the results show that deictic gestures were the dominant gestures used in both classrooms, and that directing pupils to actual referents was the most frequently used meaning conveyed through such gestures. Deictic gestures, along with others such as iconic gestures, and the few cases of particularization meanings conveyed through gestures, reflect the ‘here-and-now’ nature of the teachers’ spoken language, the concrete nature of the content matter, and the traditional classroom arrangement, which typically constrains the risk of ambiguity in the reception of the content. Most significantly, the gestures reflected a new ‘take’ on language into which the literacy classrooms were acculturating the children. The children “are being initiated into new ways of learning and new forms of [linguistic] knowledge” (Halliday, 2016, p. 12); one that can be ‘seen’, is highly conventionalized, requires certain tools, has right and wrong ways of being produced, and can be pointed at. Teachers frequently pointed to characters or strokes on the board, pointed to where strokes should begin and end, drew characters or strokes in the air, and fairly consistently formed a strong connection between gestures and the new forms of language and their referents, both of which could be seen or experienced in the classroom environment. The literacy lessons in our study were not about conceptual or abstract areas of language and literacy where teachers would be required to check for higher level cognitive understanding, but rather focused on the material attributes of the written language and their referents, and the ways of writing, recognizing and learning the sound-character correspondences of Chinese characters. By and large, this focus reflects a ‘recognition’ literacy pedagogy (Hasan, 2011): one in which the pedagogical focus is on the form of the language and the teaching of “sound-shape correspondence” (Hasan, 2011, p. 178), and an approach that seems appropriate for

the early stages of learning the written form of Chinese characters and of fulfilling the requirements of the Curriculum Standards. While gesture appears to be a useful form of scaffolding the teaching of a highly complex writing system, such as Chinese, particularly at the early stages (cf. Goldin-Meadow, 2004), how this may compare or contrast with literacy classrooms in which an alphabetic or syllabic writing system is being taught is open to further investigation. Further, the results of this study suggest that gestures and meanings of gestures may be ‘register specific’; that is, in subject fields in which more abstract concepts may be taught, or in classes on different subject areas such as history, geography, or science, the mix of gestures used and the meanings teachers convey through their gestures, may configure in very different ways. Indeed, there are several studies suggesting that register-specific gesture does occur (e.g. Roth & Lawless, 2002; Roth & Welzel, 2001; Wilson et al., 2014), although not always undertaken from the perspective of teachers’ gestures. For instance, in their study of gestures used by middle school teachers across a range of disciplines, Wilson et al. (2014) indicate that there are indeed register-specific, or subject-specific role of gestures used by teachers. They note that “gestures played a relatively minor role” in the discipline of language arts, in comparison with earth sciences in which gestures were widely used in the communication of “the characteristics and causes of physical phenomena”, and in mathematics the textual role of gestures is particularly “pronounced” (Wilson et al., 2014, p. 256). Further investigations into such configurations, would add to our understanding of the pedagogical role of gestures and their relations with the language of different subject fields, across different educational stages and age of pupils, and within different pedagogical approaches. Our classes were first-year elementary school classes. How gestures used by teachers in these classrooms compare with those used by teachers in relation to the kinds of things that children learn in later years would also provide a key insight into the relationship between gesture, language, and pedagogy, and the role of gesture in higher levels of literacy teaching and learning, particularly as the pedagogy moves from a primarily recognition literacy to an ‘action’ literacy pedagogy, where longer, more discursive forms of writing are taught, or perhaps even to a ‘reflective’ literacy where new forms of knowledge and discourse are encouraged. Funding This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Acknowledgements We wish to thank Mr Lin Ronggui and Ms Chen Hongying for the drawings of the teachers used in the figures in this paper. The drawings were based on the videos of the teachers. References Allen, L. Q. (1999). Functions of nonverbal communication in teaching and learning a foreign language. The French Review, 72(3), 469–480. Beattie, G., & Shovelton, H. (1999). Do iconic hand gestures really contribute anything to the semantic information conveyed by speech? An experimental investigation. Semiotica, 123, 1–30. Caramelli, N., Setti, A., & Maurizzi, D. D. (2004). Concrete and abstract concepts in school age children. Psychology of Language and Communication, 8(2), 1–34. Chinese Curriculum Standards of Compulsory Education ( ). (2015). The Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China. Beijing: Beijing Normal University Publishing Group. Cook, S. W., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2006). The role of gesture in learning: Do children use their hands to change their minds? Journal of Cognition and Development, 7, 211–232. Cook, S. W., Duffy, R. G., & Fenn, K. M. (2013). Consolidation and transfer of learning after observing hand gesture. Child Development, 84(6), 1863–1871.

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