Gestures, Objects, and Spaces: Exploring Teachers’ Multimodal Communication in Nursery Schools

Abstract

This study builds on the increasing evidence that the multimodal nature of adult-child interactions and the use of objects play an important role in early linguistic development. Most of these studies analyzed dyadic interactions at home, whereas few research has been conducted in early childhood education and care settings. In this paper, we characterized the multimodal nature of teachers’ communicative bids during classroom-based group interactions in nursery schools. Observational data of circle-time activities was collected from 16 Spanish nursery school classrooms, comprising 16 teachers and 161 children between two and three years of age. We analyzed teachers’ communicative bids (i.e., verbal utterances and verbal-gestural bids) considering the frequency of use of different types of gestures, to whom are they addressed (i.e., the whole group or a single child), the extent to which they involve the use of objects, the classroom layout, and the relationship between the communicative bids and the number of children that participated in each classroom. Teachers’ communication with toddlers is highly multimodal and rely on different types of gestures, although the use of objects in our sample was scarce. Descriptive analysis suggest that certain classroom layouts may favor teachers’ use of some types of gestures over others. In this article, we discuss the implications of both the use of objects and space for understanding how adults shape the linguistic contexts of young children, and the potential opportunities and limitations they pose for classroom interactions.