Gestos y prosodia en la enseñanza de ELE: un estudio experimental con docentes en formación

This study examines the use of gestures in the teaching of prosody in Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL) and their impact on prosodic production. A within-subject experimental design was conducted with ten pre-service SFL teachers. Audiovisual recordings of orally produced, prosodically controlled utterances were analyzed under three conditions: without gesture, with spontaneous gesture, and with planned prosodic gesture. The results show that teachers predominantly use gestures for semantic rather than prosodic purposes, that gesture production influences rhythmic organization and speech segmentation, and that the gestural representation of intonation contours is only partially accurate. These findings reveal limited coordination between gesture and prosody, highlighting the need to incorporate this dimension into SFL teacher education.