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A helping hand? Gestures, L2 learners, and grammar

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Author

Editor

  • Stephen McCafferty
  • Stam Gale

Summary, in English

This chapter explores what L2 learners' gestures reveal about L2 grammar. The focus is on learners’ difficulties with maintaining reference in discourse caused by their incomplete mastery of pronouns. The study highlights the systematic parallels between properties of L2 speech and gesture, and the parallel effects of grammatical development in both modalities. The validity of a communicative account of interlanguage grammar in this domain is tested by taking the cohesive properties of the gesture-speech ensemble into account. Specifically, I investigate whether learners use gestures to compensate for and to license over-explicit reference in speech. The results rule out a communicative account for the spoken variety of maintained reference. In contrast, cohesive gestures are found to be multi-functional. While the presence of cohesive gestures is not communicatively motivated, their spatial realisation is. It is suggested that gestures are exploited as a grammatical communication strategy to disambiguate speech wherever possible, but that they may also be doing speaker-internal work. The methodological importance of considering L2 gestures when studying grammar is also discussed.

Publishing year

2008

Language

English

Pages

185-210

Publication/Series

Gesture: Second language acquisition and classroom research

Document type

Book chapter

Publisher

Routledge

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Keywords

  • communication strategy
  • visibility
  • discourse
  • information structure
  • reference tracking
  • gesture
  • second language acquisition

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 978-0-8058-6053-5