Viewing Intentional Teaching Gestures: The Impact on Learners’ Japanese Output

Abstract

Intentional Teaching Gestures are gestures that have been created as a pedagogical tool for second language teaching and learning and are used in many Japanese programs. Despite their widespread use, little is known about their impact on students’ oral language production. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the effect of Intentional Teaching Gestures on students’ Japanese production. This paper reports on the quality of students’ oral language production from two Story Re-tell tasks, one with and one without viewing Intentional Teaching Gestures (ITG), after learning Japanese as a second language with ITG. Thematic analysis was undertaken of the Story Re-tell transcription data from 170 primary school participants. Findings identify that viewing ITG whilst doing Story Re-tell positively impacted learners’ oral production. The breadth of benefits included increases in the quantity of output that students produced, the expanded informational content included in their stories, and students’ increased use of a range of verbs and particles in their utterances. Viewing ITG also provided support for students’ structuring of utterances, supported self correction, and led to an improvement in their overall oral performance. These benefits have wide ranging pedagogical implications for Japanese teachers and learners.

KEYWORDS:

• Second language production
• second language learning
• language quality
• Intentional Teaching Gestures
• gesture

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Ethics approval was granted for this minimal risk study from The University of Melbourne Ethics Committee, ethics identity number 1,340,664. Additionally, the College Principal and Head of Junior School from the independent school in which the study took place gave written approval for the research to be carried out within the school and with the nominated classes. A Plain Language Statement and a Consent Form were produced as part of the Ethics process, seeking permission with informed consent from all involved.