TY - JOUR

T1 - The role of gestures in a teacher-student-discourse about atoms

AU - Abels, Simone Juliane

PY - 2016/7/6

Y1 - 2016/7/6

N2 - Recent educational research emphasises the importance of analysing talk and gestures to come to an understanding about students' conceptual learning. Gestures are perceived as complex hand movements being equivalent to other language modes. They can convey experienceable as well as abstract concepts. As well as technical language, gestures referring to chemical concepts can be a challenge for students and cause misunderstandings. The study presented here focuses on a chemistry teacher's use of gestures in a discourse about atoms. The questions of interest are how the teacher uses certain gestures, if her intentions can be reconstructed and if students seem to understand the content-related gestures. Analysis is done by applying the steps of the Documentary Method. The results show that the teacher uses imagistic gestures, because of the assumption that students can remember and understand the abstract concepts of chemistry faster by using scaffolding in forms of visualisation. Challenges of using gestures to visualise abstract chemistry concepts are discussed.

AB - Recent educational research emphasises the importance of analysing talk and gestures to come to an understanding about students' conceptual learning. Gestures are perceived as complex hand movements being equivalent to other language modes. They can convey experienceable as well as abstract concepts. As well as technical language, gestures referring to chemical concepts can be a challenge for students and cause misunderstandings. The study presented here focuses on a chemistry teacher's use of gestures in a discourse about atoms. The questions of interest are how the teacher uses certain gestures, if her intentions can be reconstructed and if students seem to understand the content-related gestures. Analysis is done by applying the steps of the Documentary Method. The results show that the teacher uses imagistic gestures, because of the assumption that students can remember and understand the abstract concepts of chemistry faster by using scaffolding in forms of visualisation. Challenges of using gestures to visualise abstract chemistry concepts are discussed.

KW - Didactics of sciences education

KW - Chemical communication

KW - Gesture

KW - chemistry

KW - Language

KW - language use

UR - http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2016/rp/c6rp00026f

U2 - 10.1039/c6rp00026f

DO - 10.1039/c6rp00026f

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 17

SP - 618

EP - 628

JO - Chemistry education Research and Practice

JF - Chemistry education Research and Practice

SN - 1756-1108

IS - 3

ER -