Gestures are gaining ground in SLA/multilingualism research. Setting the stage for this symposium, I provide some background on gestures, highlighting links between gestures, speech, language, and culture. I then briefly introduce a few areas where the form and function of gestures have hitherto been studied in L2/multilingual production and comprehension.
Over the past 50 years it has become increasingly clear that language use is embodied and multimodal, and that gestures, as an integral part of language use, must be considered in our descriptions and models of language use. Gestures have therefore also become progressively more important in SLA/multilingualism research, particularly since they fill both interactive-communicative, and individual-cognitive functions. In SLA/multilingualism studies gestures are now studied as a system to be acquired alongside speech, as semiotic resources mediating learning and teaching inside and outside of classrooms, and as tools to probe communicative and cognitive aspects of development and use. To set the stage for this symposium, I will first provide some background on the phenomenon of gesture, highlighting the links between gestures, speech, language, and culture. I will then give a brief overview of some areas where the form and function of gestures have hitherto been studied in L2/multilingual production and comprehension. Against this backdrop, the papers in this symposium provide cutting-edge examples of important new avenues of research. Drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, they examine (a) L2/multilingual speakers’ meta-awareness and productive use of speech-gesture ensembles (e.g., in learning through repair, or learning a sign language, in word finding, disambiguation, cohesion creation, and classroom management); (b) teachers’ attention to learners’ gestures; (c) the impact of gesture on foreign accent evaluation; and (d) the role of computer mediated gestures for teaching. The papers represent new approaches to old questions, but also innovative approaches to new questions which push the field forward. In each case, the analysis of speech and gestures jointly sheds new light on our understanding of how L2/bilingual users and their interlocutors deploy their linguistic resources cross-modally, providing a richer picture of learning and (multilingual) language use than speech alone.
