Teacher gestures bridge meaning: Unpacking teacher gesture in storybook read alouds to support vocabulary

Teacher gesturing is an effective strategy for promoting vocabulary learning during book reading in early childhood settings. While studies find significant variation in teachers’ use of gesture, existing studies have not explored within-teacher and across-book differences in gesturing, reducing the ability to better understand how teachers and books drive gesturing to support language learning. To address this gap, this study investigated the gestures of nine teachers across 108 observations of the same 12 books to understand factors that explain teachers’ frequency of gesturing and the ways in which teachers gesture. Using mixed methods, we estimated multilevel models and descriptive statisics to examine whether books and teacher characteristics explained teachers’ frequency of engaging in representational and iconic gestures and employed multimodal content analysis and a grounded theory approach to better understand how and why certain books elicit more of these gestures across teachers. Study findings show greater within teacher variability in frequency of gesturing as a function of book, a positive association between teacher expertise and frequency of representational gesturing, and that teachers gestured to create emotive, conceptual, and animation bridges to connect the text and illustration to support student understanding of the language in picture books. Results showed that the content of the text also explained teacher gesturing, and thus that gesturing is not solely a teacher trait, but also reflects qualities of the text. Gesture research and practice should continue to consider text selection as critical to promoting this pedagogical strategy.