Conceptualizing Gestural Representations in ESL Classrooms: Alternative Theoretical Approaches

This study adopts a transdisciplinary approach (The Douglas Fir Group, 2016) to gesture research to understand how meanings of teachers and students gestures are influenced by broader sociocultural influences and power relations and how the meanings produced in the classroom interact with second language (L2) pedagogies. I incorporate multiple theoretical concepts such as the sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978), multimodality in communication and learning (Jewitt, 2009; Kress, 2010), embodied actions as shaped by discursive knowledge (Foucault, 1979; Kubota, 1999; Luke, 1992; Ramanathan, 2010; Saavedra & Marx, 2016; Toohey, 2000) and performativity (Butler, 1999; Miller, 2012; Pennycook, 2004) as complementary to each other. Each theoretical perspective provides specific meanings to the gestural practices. The teachers and students, for example, used their gestures to scaffold each others learning processes (McCafferty, 2004; Smotrova, 2017) while the gestural signs were made and negotiated in the teaching-learning processes (Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Kress, 2010; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001). Furthermore, students gestures were subject to disciplinary regulation (Foucault, 1979) that aimed at normalizing students specific academic behavior (Toohey, 2000) while the teachers gestures both conformed to and challenged normative practices as well as created collaborative power relations (Cummins, 2004). Finally, following the concept of performativity, the ESL (English as a Second Language) pedagogies displayed in each classroom were viewed as emergent products [or outcomes] of the teachers and students repeated transmodal acts of identity (Butler, 1999; Pennycook, 2004). Drawing on the above findings, in the final chapter of this dissertation, I discuss how gesture research may inform classroom pedagogy, research and teacher education in English Language Teaching.