Multimodal Foreigner Talk: An Exploratory Study in Classroom Interactions

Abstract

peer reviewedForeigner talk (FT) is a specific type of communicative adaptation in which native speakers (NS) adapt their language use when interacting with non-native speakers (NNS). Whereas it has convincingly been shown that FT manifested itself at various levels of linguistic analysis (a.o. Long 1981; Roche 1998; Rodriguez-Cuadrado, Baus & Costa 2018; Woolridge 2001), recent research in the domain of gesture studies has suggested that simplification strategies could also be observed in hyperforms of bodily behavior, such as big or slow gestures and sustained eye gaze (a.o. Adams 1998, Gullberg 2011). This multimodal realization of foreigner talk has also been confirmed by Authors (2021) who observed that NS interacting with NNS produced hand gestures that were larger, performed faster, and that covered a larger trajectory. In this context, the present exploratory study aims at analyzing the multimodal realization of FT in classroom interactions. More specifically, we investigate to what extent NS teachers adapt their bodily behavior when addressing NNS students. To do so, we are using a within design comparing similar NS teachers respectively engaged in interactions with NNS students (experimental group) and NS students (control group). Based on the existing literature (cf. Tellier and Stam 2010, Azaoui 2013, Authors, 2021), we expect that non-verbal FT would be characterized by an increase in gesture rate, gesture duration, hold rate and duration, gesture size, gesture trajectory, and gesture velocity. We are analyzing our data using OpenPose annotations to derive kinematic data on the spatial and temporal dimensions of gesture production (cf. Authors, 2021). These analyses will make it possible to observe to what extent FT manifests itself in formal features of non-verbal communication in the context of classroom interactions