Results from a longitudinal study of gestures in adult learners of English as a foreign language

This talk will present the results of a three year long, multi-participant, longitudinal gesture vs. proficiency study. Data has been collected over a period of three years from over 60 Hong Kong learners of English as a foreign language, all Cantonese speakers. During this time, participants have performed similar video-narrating tasks up to four times (based on Tweety and Sylvester’s videos, often used in gesture studies). The gestures co-occurring during the narrations have been transcribed, together with the speech, and categorized as either referential, discursive-pragmatic or adaptors. The proficiency of the speakers has been evaluated by three independent trained evaluators. In addition, participants were asked to fill in a version of the Big 5 personality survey.
The analysis of the data is still ongoing but we expect to show some correlations between the type of gesture and the personality traits of our participants as well as their proficiency. We expect to find more referential gestures with proficiency. As the study coincided with COVID most of the data was collected online, however a small number of individuals participated face to face, which has also given us the opportunity to compare online versus face to face behaviour. Preliminary results do not indicate any significant differences.
One of the key issues affecting our study was that many of our participants’ proficiency did not improve during the study period as exchanges, English classes and travel plans were cancelled. This meant that in those cases we were also able to study their gestures eliminating the proficiency variable. Overall, it seems that familiarity with the context is a major factor affecting gesture production.