An Observational Study on An Efl Teacher Gestures in Indonesian Classroom Context

Abstract

Verbal utterances and gestures are known to be semantically and pragmatically coexpressive. Besides, gestures have a positive impact on speaker’s conceptual planning of messages and student’s comprehension and learning motivation. This observational study aimed to describe an EFL teacher uses gestures during the teaching in the language classroom. The participant of this study was an Islamic senior high school teacher with a bilingual classroom. A video recording was placed on the back of the class to capture the teacher’s gestures and interaction of the teacher and the students, and audio recording is put on the teacher’s table in the front of the class, and the researcher was at the corner of the class to observe the class synchronously. The data gathered were transcribed and analyzed using the AS-Unit for the utterances and the categorization of gestures proposed by Wang and Loewen (2016). The finding elaborated thoroughly all types of gestures produced by the teacher in her utterances and presented the visual of the gestures. Hence, results of this study provide a teaching reflection or the teacher and can be utilized as a model to be applied in providing comprehensible input and establishing a better classroom atmosphere.