Environmentally coupled depictive gestures in tea ceremony lessons

Abstract This study examines depictive gestures in naturally occurring instructional activities of chadō (tea ceremony). The participants include a trained chadō instructor and beginning-level students. Drawing on praxeological work on depictive gestures and the notion of environmentally coupled gesture (ECG), I focus on a subset of ECG: environmentally coupled depictive gesture (ECDG). This study adopts a multimodal conversation analysis framework and shows how ECDGs are integrated to various degrees with language and spatial and material features to facilitate correction and demonstration in chadō . Findings also show that the sequential context and participants’ shared experience of the chadō procedure play a pivotal role in the instructional efficacy of ECDGs. This paper concludes by discussing the role of gestures, objects, and language across instructional settings.