Teacher gesturing is an effective strategy for promoting vocabulary learning during book reading in early childhood settings. While studies find significant variation in teachers’ use of gesture, existing studies have not explored within-teacher and across-book differences in gesturing, reducing the ability to better understand how teachers and books drive gesturing to support language learning. To address this gap, this study investigated the gestures of nine teachers across 108 observations of the same 12 books to understand factors that explain teachers’ frequency of gesturing and the ways in which teachers gesture. Using mixed methods, we estimated multilevel models and descriptive statisics to examine whether books and teacher characteristics explained teachers’ frequency of engaging in representational and iconic gestures and employed multimodal content analysis and a grounded theory approach to better understand how and why certain books elicit more of these gestures across teachers. Study findings show greater within teacher variability in frequency of gesturing as a function of book, a positive association between teacher expertise and frequency of representational gesturing, and that teachers gestured to create emotive, conceptual, and animation bridges to connect the text and illustration to support student understanding of the language in picture books. Results showed that the content of the text also explained teacher gesturing, and thus that gesturing is not solely a teacher trait, but also reflects qualities of the text. Gesture research and practice should continue to consider text selection as critical to promoting this pedagogical strategy.

中文翻译：

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教师手势桥梁含义：在故事书中解开教师手势 大声朗读以支持词汇


教师手势是在幼儿阅读书籍时促进词汇学习的有效策略。虽然研究发现教师使用手势存在显着差异，但现有研究尚未探讨教师内部和书本之间手势的差异，从而降低了更好地理解教师和书籍如何驱动手势以支持语言学习的能力。为了解决这一差距，本研究调查了 9 名教师在对同一 12 本书的 108 次观察中的手势，以了解解释教师手势频率和教师手势方式的因素。使用混合方法，我们估计了多级模型和描述性统计学，以检查书籍和教师特征是否解释了教师参与代表性和标志性手势的频率，并采用多模态内容分析和扎根理论方法来更好地了解某些书籍如何以及为什么在教师中引发更多这些手势。研究结果表明，教师的手势频率作为书本功能的变化性更大，教师专业知识与代表性手势频率之间存在正相关，并且教师手势创造情感、概念和动画桥梁来连接文本和插图，以支持学生对图画书中语言的理解。结果表明，文本的内容也解释了教师的手势，因此手势不仅仅是教师的特质，还反映了文本的品质。手势研究和实践应继续将文本选择视为促进这种教学策略的关键。