Deployment of verbal-gestural intersemiosis in EFL teachers’ discourse: a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis approach

With mounting recognition of the multimodal nature of teacher discourse, teachers’ deployment of semiotic resources such as the verbal and gestural modes is considered important in meaning making, and impactful to the students. Previous studies on pedagogic gestures tend to focus on gestures per se , while how they make meanings in orchestration with the verbal mode receives less scholarly attention. To examine the meaning-making mechanisms of teachers’ verbal-gestural orchestration and their pedagogical values in English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, the present study adopts a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis approach to explore how verbal-gestural intersemiosis can be designed to achieve intended pedagogy in Chinese EFL classrooms. The meaning patterns identified are discussed in relation to their realising forms. National top-prize-winning EFL teachers’ multimodal discourse were carefully examined based on a newly integrated framework that bridges the two modes in ideational meaning making. It is revealed that laureate teachers strategically deployed four out of five intersemiosis mechanisms such as Intersemiotic Parallelism to shape their pedagogy as meaning expressions. Implications for multimodal designs of EFL teacher discourse are offered accordingly to improve classroom practices and teacher training.