Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, teacher educators had to change the delivery mode of their teaching to online environments. In this article, we explore the changes and challenges to teacher educators' professional practices during emergency remote teaching. Since teacher educators act as both teachers, peers and role models…

In this study we explore how the physical movements teachers use can lead to improved interactions between students in a university language course. The study used video to capture and analyse an intervention focusing on the effects of teacher nodding. Results showed that positive measurable differences were found in students' physical postural…

This study tested the mutual effects of the instructor's eye gaze and facial expression on students' eye movements (i.e. first fixation time to the slides, percentage dwell time on the slides, and percentage dwell time on the instructor), parasocial interaction, and learning performance in pre-recorded video lectures. Students (N = 118…

The benefits of instructor immediacy have been well researched over the past 40 years. This study investigated students' comfort with instructors' nonverbal immediacy behaviors. University students reported their comfort with three nonverbal communication behaviors: haptics, proxemics, and kinesics. A series of paired-sampled t tests suggested a…

Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study closely examines moments when an instructor's embodied explanations elicit laughter from his students -- which we refer to as laughing moments -- in an English as a second language classroom. Such laughing moments can exhibit students' attention to the teacher's explanation and also illuminate…

This article focuses on the relationship between gaze and recipient feedback in triadic storytelling activities. Our starting point to investigate this relationship is an article by Bavelas et al. (2002), who report a statistically significant interaction between feedback and so-called gaze windows in dyadic storytelling activities. The pattern…

This study aimed to identify the degree to which faculty members practice excitement styles during distance learning. The study sample consisted of (298) randomly selected male and female students who enrolled in bachelor's and master's programs in various colleges at Amman Arab University, Jordan. To achieve the study's goal, the researchers…

Material artifacts play an important role in many learning environments. Such artifacts can include sketches, manipulatives, 3D models, toys and games, or the scrap materials found in makerspaces. Some theorists have argued that material artifacts, even though they do not move or talk, should be considered to have autonomous agency and to interact…

This study looked at multiple forms of silence and nonverbal cues of language anxiety in the foreign language classroom to explore their functions from the perspectives of students. Using the Classroom Oral Participation Scheme (COPS) developed by King (2013), 18 hours of observation produced data on learners' verbal and non-verbal participation…

Purpose: Videogaming offers an interactive, enjoyable, and socially valid context for interaction between autistic and non-autistic students in schools. In this tutorial, I describe an approach that supports communication and peer interaction through group-based videogaming. This approach creates an opportunity for autistic and non-autistic…

This study, generated from considerations of embodied cognition, observational learning, and cognitive load theory, investigated the effect of mimicking gestures on learning to play piano tasks. Fifty university students from an Australian University, with two different levels of piano-playing experience, were randomly assigned to one of the two…

In the context of higher education foreign language courses are viewed as skills-oriented subjects that aim to enable students to communicate in a foreign language. The main four language skills to be developed are listening, speaking, reading and writing. Until recently, decisions about which of the linguistic skills should be emphasized in a…

In recent decades, the study of language learners' embodied behavior amongst themselves has gained much currency. Broadly speaking, a wealth of studies on learner gestures connect gestures with second language acquisition, and have shown that gestures play a role in facilitating communication, acquisition, and retention (Gullberg, 1998, 2011,…

Foreign language teaching highlights the cultivation of the learners' communicative competence, because the main purpose of learning a foreign language is to use the target language to communicate. However, many students in higher institutions in China cannot speak English fluently after having learned English for more than ten years, although…

Demonstratives and pointing gestures are universal, early emerging, and ubiquitous, and it has long been claimed that there is a special relationship between them. But what exactly is the nature of this relationship? The present study investigates this question using a referential communication task. Speakers referred to targets that were near or…