Multimodality and Gestures in the Teacher?s Communication

The paper presents a research on the multimodal communication of teachers in the classroom. The “musical score”, a procedure for the analysis of multimodal communication, is used to analyse aspects of the signals produced and of the meanings conveyed by teachers while interacting with their pupils, by focusing not only on affective and interactional aspects, but also on the cognitive effects of nonverbal communication. Finally, the paper shows how, based on this procedure, it is possible to analyse chunks of teachers’ communication, and to distinguish different multimodal communicative styles among different teachers. 1 Multimodality in the Classroom Among studies on everyday interaction, an interesting area for the study of multimodal communication is teacher-pupil interaction, a topic generally studied in the domains of education, linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and social psychology [1], [2], [3], [4]. [5] applied Ekman and Friesen’s analysis [6], mainly stressing...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: GW
• Authors: Giorgio Merola, Isabella Poggi
• Keywords: GW 2003, Interactional Aspects, Multimodal Communication, Nonverbal Communication