The role of gesture in teacher-students interaction

The aim of the present research is to investigate the importance of teachers non-verbal communication in Italian SL/FL classrooms. Teachers non-verbal behaviour is a fundamental aspect of teacher-students interaction, because it helps in providing comprehensible and useful didactic input and in improving the language learning process. Despite the importance of non-verbal communication in human social interaction, it has hardly been investigated. A lack of knowledge by SL/FL teachers about this interactional aspect will determine many problems in education such as incompleteness and inefficiency of classroom teaching. Hence, a multimodal analysis of real video-recordings of Italian as SL/FL lessons is crucial to understand the weight and meaning of some gestural categories, facial expressions and eye contacts. Data included in this study are taken from video-recordings available on YouTube Channel showing, each one, different classroom settings and speakers.