Pedagogical Functions of Deictic Gestures in the Context of Teaching French as a Foreign Language


DENİZCİ C.

AGP Humanities and Social Sciences Conference, Prag, Çek Cumhuriyeti, 19 - 22 Mayıs 2017, ss.13

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Prag
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Çek Cumhuriyeti
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.13
  • İstanbul Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Abstract: Classroom interactions take place in a multi-semiotic environment where teachers benefit from a variety of pedagogical aids and resort to different modalities within their teaching discourses for facilitating access to meaning, managing classroom activities and making evaluative statements. This study aims to examine the pedagogical functions of hand gestures called deictics serving to point towards a concrete or an abstract referent. Hence, the data were collected in natural settings; i.e., through video recorded classroom interactions of three teachers teaching French as a foreign language in Turkey. The results show that deictic gestures are used to inform students and to manage classroom interactions in general. When these gestures are used for informational purposes, they mostly convey syntactic information through abstraction or they just show an element written/featuring on the blackboard or
elsewhere for the purpose of linguistically clarifying the meaning. As for the interactive function of these gestures, they are mostly performed for regulating speech turns and for directly or indirectly evaluating students’ contributions. In brief, within the scope of this study, it was tried to establish a functional categorization of deictic gestures produced by teachers in foreign language teaching classrooms for pedagogical purposes.
Keywords: Deictic Gestures, Teacher Gestures, Classroom Interactions, Teaching of French as a Foreign Language