“Multimodal Language in the Foreign Language Classroom. A study on the Perception of Gestures by Foreign Language Teachers”

The main aim of this article is to support the hypothesis that gestures and body movements spontaneously play an essential role in the context of language teaching by analysing data from ongoing empirical research. Gestures are an integral part of the human communication system, as it has been demonstrated in several psycholinguistic studies. It is argued that there is a need to raise awareness of the potential of multimodality among language teachers and students to promote kinaesthetic learning. The theoretical framework of this paper is derived from the theories of embodied cognition in combination with the total physical response approach. Gestures and body movements are fundamental for cognitive and communicative functions such as conceptualisation, thought organisation, language production and comprehension, development and management of emotions and pragmatic aspects. The analysis of data collected as part of a study on the perception of gestures by foreign language teachers, which is presented in this paper, confirms that the use of gestures and body movements by language teachers corresponds to each of the cognitive and communicative functions mentioned above.