Reconsidering Gesture Space for Naturalistic Teaching Gesture Research

Résumé En

The use of gesture space constitutes a crucial factor for teachers in terms of ensuring a clear view of their movements as visual clues to convey meaning properly. Although various studies deal with the delimitation of gesture space within experimental settings, the handling of the issue for natural classroom corpora is very rare. Based on the video recordings of three French classes, criteria were firstly determined in order to provide a 3D gesture space description for a speaker gesticulating in a standing position. Then, both methodological and pedagogical implications resulting from the qualitative analysis of gesture space were discussed. In this perspective, five methodological/pedagogical relevancies arise from the description of teachers' use of gesture space in naturalistic classroom settings: the decrease of amplitude within consecutive gestures, the necessity for promoting the upper gestural zones, the problems related to the description of gesture space from the profile view, the intervention of two hands in two different gesture spaces and the extension of the limbs to the backside of the body.