Teachers’ gestures and speech in mathematics lessons: forging common ground by resolving trouble spots

This research focused on how teachers establish and maintain shared understanding with students during classroom mathematics instruction. We studied the micro-level interventions that teachers implement spontaneously as a lesson unfolds, which we call micro - interventions . In particular, we focuse...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ZDM 2013-05, Vol.45 (3), p.425-440
Main Authors: Alibali, Martha W., Nathan, Mitchell J., Church, R. Breckinridge, Wolfgram, Matthew S., Kim, Suyeon, Knuth, Eric J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Classroom Communication
Classrooms
Communication
Education
Educational materials
Educational Research
Instructional Materials
Language
Learning
Mathematical analysis
Mathematics
Mathematics Education
Middle schools
Original Article
Qualitative analysis
Semiotics
Speech
Students
Teachers
Teaching
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Summary:This research focused on how teachers establish and maintain shared understanding with students during classroom mathematics instruction. We studied the micro-level interventions that teachers implement spontaneously as a lesson unfolds, which we call micro - interventions . In particular, we focused on teachers’ micro-interventions around trouble spots , defined as points during the lesson when students display lack of understanding. We investigated how teachers use gestures along with speech in responding to such trouble spots in a corpus of six middle-school mathematics lessons. Trouble spots were a regular occurrence in the lessons ( M  = 10.2 per lesson). We hypothesized that, in the face of trouble spots, teachers might increase their use of gestures in an effort to re-establish shared understanding with students. Thus, we predicted that teachers would gesture more in turns immediately following trouble spots than in turns immediately preceding trouble spots. This hypothesis was supported with quantitative analyses of teachers’ gesture frequency and gesture rates, and with qualitative analyses of representative cases. Thus, teachers use gestures adaptively in micro-interventions in order to foster common ground when instructional communication breaks down.
ISSN:1863-9690
1863-9704
DOI:10.1007/s11858-012-0476-0