The embodied work of teaching grammar and pronunciation in IELTS speaking tutorials

Extending the insights of recent research on the embodied work of teaching, this study focuses on the multimodal construction of teaching objects (past tense forms and pronunciation of ‘ar’) in an underresearched educational site: speaking tutorials for IELTS preparation at a university English language center. The study shows a tutor’s embodied instructional actions during activities such as correcting, explaining, guiding students’ attention, eliciting their responses, and commenting on their performance. It demonstrates how these actions are accomplished through the artful co-configuration of talk, gestural and facial practices, and operations on written texts. Moreover, this article is concerned with tracking how teaching objects of grammar and pronunciation evolve over time. The documentation of the students’ orientation to these teaching objects in subsequent speech events show, to some extent, the students gaining control of the forms as an outcome of the tutor’s teaching. The findings suggest pedagogical implications for teaching and learning.