Gesture and the acquisition of L2 English tense and aspect

Abstract

There has been growing interest in the overlapping area between second language acquisition (SLA) and gesture. In the overlapping area, there is a need for more research that quantitatively measures the effects of pedagogical gestures on L2 learning. To fill the gap, the present study carried out a true experiment that adopted a pretest-treatment-immediate posttest-delayed posttest design. Specifically, the experiment examined the effects of a pedagogical deictic gesture on L1 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the L2 English past tense -ed and the effects of a pedagogical metaphoric gesture on the learners’ acquisition of the L2 English progressive aspect -ing (Research Question 1). Given that the pedagogical gestures spatialize the temporal concepts of the past tense and the progressive aspect, they belong to “temporal gestures” and are termed as “pedagogical temporal gestures” in the present study. The 90 adult participants in the study were randomly assigned to three treatment conditions, each condition with 30 participants: two experimental conditions (i.e., verbal instruction with pedagogical gestures and verbal instruction without pedagogical gestures) and one control condition (i.e., no treatment during the experiment). At each testing time, an untimed grammaticality judgment test (UGJT) and an elicited imitation test (EIT) (Ellis, 2005) were conducted to respectively measure the participants’ explicit knowledge (or perception) and implicit knowledge (or production) of the target structures. Statistical analyses of the UGJT and EIT scores showed no significant difference between the instruction + gesture and the instruction only groups, indicating that the pedagogical temporal gestures did not significantly enhance the acquisition of the L2 English tense and aspect. In addition, to explain or complement the quantitative results from the experiment, the present study conducted follow-up semi-structured interviews with the participating learners who received verbal instruction with pedagogical gestures. The interview questions were about the learners’ perceptions of pedagogical gestures (Research Question 2). The interview data were analyzed qualitatively through content analysis. Thus, the whole study adopted a mixed methods design, specifically, an explanatory sequential design. Content analyses of the semi-structured interview responses revealed that the participants were overwhelmingly in favor of the pedagogical gestures because the gestures helped them understand the abstract temporal concepts of the target structures through the concrete spatial hand movements. Integrating the quantitative results for Research Question 1 and the qualitative results for Research Question 2 generates interesting findings. On the one hand, the qualitative results for Research Question 2 indicate the efficacy of the pedagogical gestures in improving the learners’ conceptualizations of tense-aspect. The improvement in conceptualizations was not measured by the language tests (i.e., UGJT and EIT), but the benefit may not be negligible. On the other hand, the quantitative results for Research Question 1 suggest the inefficacy of the pedagogical gestures in improving the learners’ perception and production of tense-aspect. Similarly, Nakatsukasa (2013, 2021) found limited facilitating effects of a pedagogical deictic gesture on learners’ acquisition of the L2 English past tense (although the validity of the gesture is questionable). By contrast, some other previous studies showed efficacy of pedagogical gestures in improving learners’ perception and/or production of some other L2 target structures, including vocabulary (García-Gámez, Cervilla, Casado, & Macizo, 2021; Huang, Kim, & Christianson, 2018; Tellier, 2008), locative prepositions (Nakatsukasa, 2013, 2016), and pronunciation (Iizuka, Nakatsukasa, & Braver, 2020; Li, Baills, & Prieto, 2020; Morett & Chang, 2015). Synthesizing the differential effects of pedagogical gestures discovered in different studies, I propose that the effectiveness of a pedagogical gesture can to some extent depend on the concreteness of the corresponding target structure. If the target structure has concrete meaning (e.g., vocabulary and locative prepositions) or concrete form (e.g., pronunciation), then the gesture can directly convey the concrete meaning or form and improve learners’ acquisition. If the target structure has abstract meaning (e.g., tense-aspect), then the gesture needs to concretize and spatialize the meaning. In this case, only conceptualization of the target structure can be enhanced, and learners’ form-meaning mapping of the target structure cannot be enhanced. The findings of the present study not only fill the research gaps, but also generate pedagogical and theoretical implications. Pedagogical implications include: the implicit L2 knowledge and the progressive aspect can be weak areas to L2 learners of English; functions of gestures for teaching abstract targets include facilitating memorizing, concretizing abstract concepts, facilitating inferring and generalizing, and being more engaging and convenient than other means; gestures can significantly improve the acquisition of target structures with concrete meanings or forms, and can also improve conceptualization of abstract concepts. Theoretical implications include: the findings provide empirical evidences for the theoretical propositions regarding the interrelationships among gesture, thought, and SLA (including “Gesture-for-Conceptualization Hypothesis” [Kita, Alibali, & Chu, 2017], “gesture as a medium of SLA” [Gullberg, 2006, 2014; Gullberg, de Bot, & Volterra, 2008], and “the boundaries of gesture-speech integration during language comprehension” [Kelly, 2017]), and the findings also provide an example for the disconnected relationship between thought and language forms.