Foreign language teaching has taken place in video-mediated settings since the end of the 1990s, and has grown in importance and popularity ever since (O’Dowd, 2023). In parallel with this growth, researchers have increasingly investigated numerous pedagogical aspects involved in video-mediated interaction (Guichon & Tellier, 2017; Satar & Wigham, 2023). One critical aspect of teaching via videoconferencing platforms is making one’s gestures visible to the webcam (Guichon & Wigham, 2016; Holt, 2024a, 2024b). Previous studies have shown that teachers make their gestures visible to the webcam during lexical explanation sequences — in which a lexical item is discussed, defined, or explained — in order to manage the different phases involved in a sequence from opening to closing (Wigham, 2017), or to focus on specific aspects of a lexical item’s form, meaning, or usage, often while directly involving the learners in the explanation process (Holt, 2020, 2021). Some studies have attempted to determine a link between certain factors, such as the presence or absence of manifested incomprehension, or the initiator of the sequence (i.e., the teacher or the learner), and the presence of teacher-produced gestures. One of these exploratory studies suggested that the presence of manifested incomprehension did not lead to increased visible gesture production by teachers in a video-mediated learning environment (Holt et al., 2015). Another study conducted in a face-to-face classroom setting suggested that teachers are more likely to produce gestures when focus on form is initiated by a learner (Inceoglu, 2015). Inceoglu & Loewen (2022) pointed out that more studies are necessary in video-mediated settings to determine what factors might contribute to teacher gesture production during corrective feedback episodes. To our knowledge, no study has used inferential statistics to examine whether the initiator of a lexical explanation sequence — the teacher or the learner — affects gesture production in a video-mediated context. The current study aims to address this specific research gap by determining whether certain factors — such as the initiator of the sequence, the presence of manifested incomprehension, the type of incomprehension, and the type of lexical item — are associated with gesture production by pre-service French teachers during lexical explanation sequences that occur naturally during video-mediated task-based language teaching.