5 - Gestural interaction between the instructor and the learner in origami instruction

Summary

Introduction

Do people gesturally interact with each other? If so, how? Is there any consistent and more or less systematic change in the way one of the participants in a dyadic communication gesturally responds to her partner as the latter participant's gesture changes? These are the questions which will be pursued in the present chapter.

These questions have rarely been addressed in the field of gesture–speech research. Most studies have focused on the relationship between speech and gesture in single speakers, who are merely individual participants in the narrative settings as a whole. The speakers have been analyzed independently of the interaction with the communicative partner. This paradigm, which can be called a narrator-centered paradigm, has raised many important questions and brought a variety of significant insights into the field. If gestural interaction between interlocutors can also be found, and if we can determine how partners gesturally interact, the present study will shed new light on the theory of spontaneous gestures to the extent that the model of gesture and speech should take into consideration inter personal factors as well as intra personal factors (Vygotsky 1962; McNeill & Duncan, this volume).

Some researchers have already begun paying attention to and describing the phenomena of gestural interaction in a broad sense in pursuit of the question of what the listener does in a narrative setting. As one may easily imagine, even in an experimental setting the listener is actively engaged in the communication by using non-verbal behavior, such as nodding and shaking her head, making facial expressions to show whether she comprehends what she has heard, and responding to what the narrator talks about by, for example, smiling.