This talk outlines how students’ gesture-speech interface in second language classrooms/studies can provide teachers/researchers with a more comprehensive understanding of what students do and do not understand in the classroom. Gaining a full sense of students’ understanding helps teachers/researchers to more highly attune the mediation that they provide to learners.
This presentation will report on different ways in which students' gesture-speech interface in second language classrooms/studies can provide teachers/researchers with a more comprehensive understanding of what students do and do not yet understand. Students' gesture-speech interface can reveal important details in their understanding of vocabulary, grammar, literacy, or motion events for example. Gaining a full sense of students' understanding helps teachers/researchers to more highly attune the mediation that they provide to learners in the form of speech and gesture, culturally constructed artifacts etc. Investigating students' speech alone is insufficient to allow teachers/researchers to adequately attune their mediation as it provides a limited viewpoint of students' understanding. Teachers/researchers' highly attuned mediation, allowing maximum student agency within the learners' zone of proximal development, will lead their development.
