ABSTRACT
A teacher's physical movements are rich, multimodal, visual resources for students who are learning a new language. Inexperienced teachers, however, often struggle to use their bodies effectively and must develop awareness of how to use their bodies as pedagogical affordances. This chapter identifies the embodiment-related challenges and growth experienced by novice language teachers in practice teaching sessions in two pre-service language teacher education programs in the United States and France. Using qualitative discourse analysis of excerpts from several video-recorded corpora, and Cooperrider's framework of background/foreground gestures, we show how experienced teachers exhibit key characteristics of what we call pedagogical gesture, and how novice teachers begin to develop these characteristics as they start to “foreground” gesture during their teacher education programs. The article also proposes methodological principles that can be offered to language teachers in pre-service teacher education programs to optimize their use of the body in language teaching.
