spotlight sessions --- Qu Congyi Joy
Abstract
As an important category of nonverbal behaviour, gesture is defined as the spontaneous, synchronized, and meaningful hand and arm movements produced by people when they speak (McNeill, 2005). “Gestures are spatio-visual phenomena influenced by contextual and socio-psychological factors, and also closely tied to sophisticated speaker-internal, linguistic processes”(Gullberg, 2008: 149). Gestures are closely linked to speech and mind, and they can offer valuable insights into the processes of L2 acquisition, like L1 transfer, processing difficulties, and interlanguage.
Conceptualization of time in mind can be expressed by verbal language through multiple means including morphological means (i.e. tense and aspect markings on verbs) (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000). Conceptualization of time in mind can also be expressed by nonverbal gesture. People first conceptualize abstract time as space in mind, and then map the concrete spatial representations onto gestures. These gestures, expressing temporality and occurring simultaneously with oral temporal devices such as tense and aspect marking, are called “Temporal Gestures” (Cooperrider et al, 2014: 1781), the intersection and linkage between gesture and tense-aspect system.
Previous research into L2 tense and aspect acquisition has mainly focused on verbal modality and neglected the nonverbal gesture modality. To study through gesture can add a more vivid and comprehensive dimension of teaching, learning, acquiring, and processing L2 tense and aspect. The study looks into the acquisition of L2 English tense and aspect through the lens of gesture. Combining both qualitative and quantitative, offline and online research methods and techniques from sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and language education, it discovers: 1) the roles of pedagogical gesture in teaching and learning L2 English tense and aspect; 2) the online processing of L2 English tense and aspect as reflected in sensitivity to and inhibitory control of temporal gesture-speech incongruencies; 3) the acquisitional trajectory of temporal gesturing as a developing system in its own right.