How Teachers Link Ideas in Mathematics Instruction Using Speech and Gesture: A Corpus Analysis

This research investigated how teachers express links between ideas in speech, gestures, and other modalities in middle school mathematics instruction. We videotaped 18 lessons (3 from each of 6 teachers), and within each, we identified linking episodessegments of discourse in which the teacher connected mathematical ideas. For each link, we identified the modalities teachers used to express linked ideas and coded whether the content was new or review. Teachers communicated most links multimodally, typically using speech and gestures. Teachers' gestures included depictive gestures that simulated actions and perceptual states, and pointing gestures that grounded utterances in the physical environment. Compared to links about new material, teachers were less likely to express links about review material multimodally, especially when that material had been mentioned previously. Moreover, teachers gestured at a higher rate in links about new material. Gestures are an integral part of teachers' communication during mathematics instruction. There is great variability in what students learn from classroom instruction. Many factors are potentially relevant to understanding variations in students' learning. In this research, we focus on one such factor: the nature of teachers' communication about key aspects of the instructional material. We focus in particular on teachers' communication about relationships between ideas in mathematics lessons, because such relationships are often challenging for students to grasp but also central to mathematical understanding. Our primary goal in this work was to document how teachers express links between ideas in speech, gestures, and other modalities in naturalistic classroom instruction in middle school mathematics.