Teachers’ gestures in synchronous online language classrooms: embodied elicitation strategies for student participation

Classroom interaction research has increasingly embraced the analysis of multimodal resources, including teacher gestures, alongside verbal input in eliciting student contributions. This focus has extended to online video-mediated classrooms, where such strategies remain equally indispensable. Employing a multimodal Conversation Analysis approach, this study examines an English language teacher’s multimodal interactional strategy to elicit student contributions in online video-mediated interactions. Drawing on screen recordings of online English language classrooms in higher education, the analysis reveals how the teacher established embodied elicitation strategies as an online classroom norm to facilitate and balance multiparty student participation through hand gestures, empowering students to regulate their involvement through their gestures. This study provides deeper insights into the role of teacher gestures in online classroom interactions, shedding light on how the affordances and constraints of different interactional environments shape their use. The findings offer valuable implications for enhancing the pedagogical practices of both pre-service and in-service teachers.