A Multilingual Perspective on Metaphoric Gestures for Language Education Purposes

This contribution aims to argue the power of metaphoric gestures to achieve important goals in language education and to show cultural differences in multilingual contexts. To demonstrate and to evaluate the cognitiveand communicativefunctions of these gestures, this paper will analyzethree different examples of metaphoric gesture: the scissor hand gesture, the future and past gestures, and the metaphoric components of the explanatory gestures used for teaching the Italian expression fare la scarpetta (literally translated, “make the little shoe”). The results indicate that metaphoric gestures are affected by cultural differences and can be used to teach these differences across multilingual settings. They also can be used to illuminate the vocabulary and speech properties(e.g.,intonation) of a target language, thus facilitating the learning of it.