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Part of
Engagement in Professional Genres
Edited by Carmen Sancho Guinda
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 301] 2019
► pp. 277–296

Chapter 15
Gestural silence

An engagement device in the multimodal genre of the chalk talk lecture

| Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
| Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
| Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

This chapter reports on a study of multimodal engagement strategies used by instructors while performing chalk talk, the genre of university mathematics lecture. Relying on multimodal data, the study examines how university mathematics instructors engage students in chalk talk through gestures, writing on the chalkboard, and speech. One of the engagement strategies identified in the study is the use of gestural silence, or the absence of the instructor’s hand movement, intended to engage students in doing mathematics. The study indicates that such multimodal engagement strategies appear to be shaped by the embodied nature of discipline-specific genres.

Keywords: engagement, genre, gestural silence, multimodality, university mathematics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Chalk talk: A multimodal professional genre of mathematics
    • 2.1Engagement in the multimodal genre of chalk talk
    • 2.2Gestural silence as an engagement device
  • 3.Conceptual framework
    • 3.1Research on gestures
  • 4.Methods
  • 5.Findings: Communicative functions of gestural silences
  • 6.Conclusions and implications
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.301.15fog
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