ABSTRACT
As a contribution to research on gesture and its role in second language acquisition (SLA), this chapter identifies and examines a naturally occurring interactional practice: speakers’ gesturally-enhanced repeats of lexical items in response to indications that someone encountered problems hearing or understanding prior talk. Analysis of occurrences of this practice in spontaneous talk among language learners provides evidence of both the recipient’s attending to the gesture and talk as input and the recipient’s interactional claim of understanding in order for the interaction to move forward. While this is only one of many interactional contexts in which gesture and talk co-occur, it is one that occurs naturally in talk among non-native speakers, and this may have implications for naturally occurring SLA, as well as possible implications for language pedagogy.
