Nonverbal behavior and corrective feedback in nine ESL university-level classrooms

Nonverbal behavior is an area of recent interest in second language acquisition (SLA). Some researchers have found that teachers’ nonverbal behavior plays a role in second language (L2) learners’ learning. Furthermore, corrective feedback during L2 interaction can also be facilitative of L2 development; however, little is known about how nonverbal behavior accompanies teachers’ corrective feedback. The current study investigated teachers’ nonverbal behavior in corrective feedback during 48 observations (about 65 hours of recordings) of nine classrooms for English as a second language (ESL). The results indicated that teachers used a variety of nonverbal behavior in their corrective feedback, including hand gestures (specifically iconics, metaphorics, deictics, and beats), head movements, affect displays, kinetographs, and emblems. Specific nonverbal behaviors that commonly occurred in the observations were nodding, head shaking, pointing at an artifact, and pointing at a person.