When do teachers gesture?

Abstract Video-mediated interaction is becoming increasingly common in foreign language education ( O’Dowd, 2023 ), offering learners opportunities to develop oral skills through interaction with L1 speakers. Lexical explanation sequences are of particular interest in cognitive-interactionist research ( Loewen & Sato, 2018 ) because they engage learners in focusing on both form and meaning ( Long & Robinson, 1998 ). Gestures play a key role in language learning in general ( Stam & Tellier, 2022 ), and in lexical acquisition in particular ( Macedonia et al., 2019 ), both in face-to-face ( Tellier et al., 2021 ) and video-mediated contexts ( Holt, 2020 ). However, webcam framing limits gesture visibility ( Guichon & Wigham, 2016 ), forcing teachers to adapt. While some research has examined gesture production during teacher- or learner-initiated negotiation in face-to-face settings ( Inceoglu & Loewen, 2022 ), little is known about this relationship in video-mediated contexts. This study addresses that gap by analyzing 305 lexical explanation sequences from the ISMAEL corpus ( Guichon & Tellier, 2017 ), focusing on the relationship between gesture production by pre-service teachers and the initiator of the sequence, the presence of visible incomprehension, the type of lexical difficulty (comprehension vs. production), and the grammatical category of the lexical item. Results show that gestures are significantly more likely when learners visibly display incomprehension, and when the difficulty is related to comprehension. These findings highlight the importance of gesture use during video-mediated teaching, especially during lexical explanation sequences and in response to signs of learner incomprehension.