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

Abstract

Abstract: Classroom interactions take place in a multi-semiotic environment where teachers benefit from a variety ofpedagogical 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 pedagogicalfunctions of hand gestures called deictics serving to point towards a concrete or an abstract referent. Hence, the datawere collected in natural settings; i.e., through video recorded classroom interactions of three teachers teachingFrench as a foreign language in Turkey. The results show that deictic gestures are used to inform students and tomanage classroom interactions in general. When these gestures are used for informational purposes, they mostlyconvey 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 deicticgestures 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