Delivering English Language Teaching Materials Through Hand Gestures: A View From Multimodal Perspective

Abstract

The use of gestures is expected to be a way that can help teachers deliver the material presented. Students are capturing the movements that are produced by the teachers and maintaining their attention since the speech is linked with the environment (Valenzeno et al., 2003). This study aimed to investigate the gestures used by the teacher to deliver English teaching materials. It adopted qualitative content analysis as research design. The data were collected from non-participant observation and the entire classroom activity was recorded by a video camera. Moreover, the data of teacher’s gestures were analyzed using Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (henceforth SFMDA) by the perspective of (Martinec, 2000) to reveal what are teacher’s gestures represented during classroom activity and the meaning behind. Based on the findings, the researcher found several multimodal meanings represented in teacher’s gestures while teaching learning process, they are: 1) gestures of raising hand and pointing student to emphasize the instruction during teaching learning process, 2) gestures of counting down finger, raising class object
and open arms to encourage students’ understanding of material during learning activities, 3) gestures of pointing classroom object, raising index middle finger and connecting thumb and index finger into a circle to engage students’ attention during classroom activity, 4) gestures of giving thumbs up to praise students’ learning process. Furthermore, this study provides the information to the readers of using gestures in facilitating students’ understanding while teaching English material.