Teacher Orchestration of Language and Gesture in Explaining Science Concepts in Images

Abstract

Students’ difficulties interpreting diagrams remain a concern in science education. Research about improving diagram comprehension has included few studies of teachers’ orchestration of language and gesture in explaining diagrams—and very few in senior high schools. Research with younger students and studies of research scientists’ practice indicate the significance of the interaction of teachers’ gesture and language in explaining visualisations. The strategic deployment of such teacher-focussed authoritative explanations has been observed in facilitating progression to more complex and symbolic representations in classroom work. However, the paucity of such research in senior high school leaves open the question of how these teachers use gesture and language in managing the challenges of explaining the intricate sub-microscopic and abstract visualisations senior high school students need to negotiate. In this paper, we outline existing studies of teachers’ use of gesture and language to explain complex images in senior high school and investigate how it is managed by two biology teachers with images of different types and complexity representing the activity of certain cell components in the early phase of cell duplication. Implications are drawn for foci of further research including the role of a metalanguage describing different types of visualisations and their affordances.

Orchestration of talk and gestures for dialogic scaffolding: a case study of reading instruction / Orquestación del habla y los gestos para un andamiaje dialógico: un estudio de caso de la enseñanza de la lectura

“…The authors posit that insufficient attention has been paid to how gestures and language explain diagrams, and others argue that previous studies have not directly examined teachers' gestures as a form of scaffolding (Alibali & Nathan, 2007). Referencing Ngo, Hood, et al (2022), the authors provide a new linguistic perspective on 'body language' as 'paralanguage', referring to gesture, body orientation, body movement, facial expression and voice quality resources that support the spoken language (Ngo, Unsworth, and Herrington, 2022). The authors create a framework to provide comprehensive modelling of paralanguage, categorizing them into either sonovergent (always co-occurs with talk and operates in sync with rhythm) or semovergent (a bodily version of language).…”

“…Ngo, Unsworth, and Herrington (2022) studied teacher orchestration of language and gestures in explaining science concepts in images. The authors posit that insufficient attention has been paid to how gestures and language explain diagrams, and others argue that previous studies have not directly examined teachers’ gestures as a form of scaffolding (Alibali & Nathan, 2007).…”

“…Ngo, Unsworth, y Herrington (2022) estudiaron la orquestación de lenguaje y gestos de los docentes al explicar conceptos científicos en imágenes. Los autores denuncian que no se ha prestado suficiente atención a la contribución de los gestos y del lenguaje para explicar diagramas, y otros autores sugieren que en estudios previos no se analizan directamente los gestos de los docentes como forma de andamiaje (Alibali & Nathan, 2007).…”

A comparative study of high school mathematics teachers’ audible teaching language: A student satisfaction perspective

“…Both language and the body play a vital role in the foundation of higher-order thinking, with dynamic gestures and speech making individually essential contributions to the formation of mathematical arguments (Pier et al, 2019). The teacher's body language has to coordinate with the verbal language to convey more visual information (Ngo et al, 2022). Therefore, it is also crucial to study teachers' audible language in mathematics classrooms.…”

Prompting story elements in first grade: An intermodal approach for exploring two teachers’ orchestrations

“…In response to the relative lack of research into how visual representations are “unpacked” in the teaching of language arts, the present study focuses on two teachers’ didactic and intermodal orchestration in using the graphical model Story Face as a prompting stage for to negotiate narrative story elements when teaching first-grade students. As further described in the Analytical procedure section, we needed to go beyond studying multiple modes and their individual contributions, taking instead an intermodal approach (see Kartika-Ningsih and Rose, 2021; Ngo et al, 2022) to study how several modes are employed in conjunction with one another and used as prompts for various genre-theoretical features and dimensions.…”