Materials for an oral presentations class on gesture: Navigating a visual with your audience

Abstract

This paper proposes pedagogical activities for teaching students about gesture's intimate involvement with assessed speaking activities. The focus is on oral presentations and the communicative practice of navigating a visual with the audience's attention intact. The classroom materials were based on research published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes and developed with three stages of input from language teachers at a university in Hong Kong. The class objectives are for students to discover how different ways of gesturing when explaining a visual can be demonstrably related to the presenters' situational awareness, content knowledge, and spoken language ability (in terms of grammatical complexity). While contributing to gesture pedagogy being developed from the perspectives of semiotic multimodality and Second Language Acquisition gesture studies, the materials embody an approach to gesture informed by enaction theory and ecological psychology.