Steven G. McCafferty and Gale Stam 2008 Gesture: Second Language Acquisition and Classroom Research. New York.Routledge

This book demonstrates the vital connection between language and gesture, and why it is critical for research on second language acquisition to take into account the full spectrum of communicative phenomena. The study of gesture in applied linguistics is just beginning to come of age. This edited volume, the first of its kind, covers a broad range of concerns that are central to the field of SLA. The chapters focus on a variety of second-language contexts, including adult classroom and naturalistic learners, and represent learners from a variety of language and cultural backgrounds.

Gesture: Second Language Acquisition and Classroom Research is organized in five sections:

Part I, Gesture and its L2 Applications, provides both an overview of gesture studies and a review of the L2 gesture research.
Part II, Gesture and Making Meaning in the L2, offers three studies that all take an explicitly sociocultural view of the role of gesture in SLA.
Part III, Gesture and Communication in the L2, focuses on the use and comprehension of gesture as an aspect of communication.
Part IV, Gesture and Linguistic Structure in the L2, addresses the relationship between gesture and the acquisition of linguistic features, and how gesture relates to proficiency.
Part V, Gesture and the L2 Classroom, considers teachers’ gestures, students’ gestures, and how students’ interpret teachers’ gestures.
Although there is a large body of research on gesture across a number of disciplines including anthropology, communications, psychology, sociology, and child development, to date there has been comparatively little investigation of gesture within applied linguistics. This volume provides readers unfamiliar with L2 gesture studies with a powerful new lens with which to view many aspects of language in use, language learning, and language teaching.

For authors and Table of Contents see:
http://www.routledgeeducation.com/books/Gesture-isbn9780805860535

Isabella Poggi 2007 Hands, Mind, Face and Body: A Goal and Belief View of Multimodal Communication Berlin. Weidler

Communication is multimodal. In everyday interaction we do not communicate only by words, but by our whole body. We talk by gestures, facial expression, gaze, body movements, posture, and these communicative modalities interact with each other in subtle and complex ways. But can we disentangle the different sounds in a symphony, the different pieces in a mosaic? This book claims that the communication scholar can write down the musical score of the communicative symphony by attributing a specific meaning to each single signal - to each gesture, gaze, facial expression - and by finding out lexicons of all communicative modalities. If Linguists have been writing dictionaries of verbal languages for millennia, why not start compiling a new type of dictionaries, and discover the lexicons and the alphabets of gestures, gaze, or touch? Part I of this book (Mind) presents a cognitive model of communication in terms of the notions of goal and belief; Parts II (Hands) and III (Face) analyse gestural and facial communication in detail, by distinguishing universal and cultural aspects in gesture and gaze, showing the differences between gestures that are codified in our mind and gestures that we create on the spot, and teaching how to make a dictionary of touch or how to find the meanings conveyed by the eyebrows. Part IV (Body) presents an annotation scheme to transcribe and analyse signals in all modalities and to capture the meaning of their interaction, that has proved useful for empirical research on multimodality and for its simulation in Embodied Conversational Agents; to illustrate the potentialities of this tool, multimodal discourses are analysed, taken from TV talk shows, political discourse, classroom interaction, speech-therapy sessions, judicial debates, university examinations and comic movies. The subtleties of multimodality are dissected, showing how the whole body can be a tool for indirect and contradictory messages, deception, joke, irony and other sophisticated uses of communication.

Prof. Dr. Isabella Poggi teaches General Psychology and Psychology of Communication at Roma Tre University. She works to the construction of a cognitive model of mind, social interaction and communication, through conceptual analysis, observative research and simulation in Embodied Agents. After her first research about the teaching of Italian as a first language, she has published books and papers about emotions (guilt, shame, humiliation, pity, enthusiasm), deception, persuasion, verbal and multimodal communication in humans and machines.

For Table of Contents see:
http://www.weidler-verlag.de/Reihen/KZKda/kzk19/kzk19.html

Susan Duncan, Justine Cassell and Elena Levy 2007 Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language Amsterdam: Benjamins

Each of the 21 chapters in this volume reflects a view of language as a dynamic phenomenon with emergent structure, and in each, gesture is approached as part of language, not an adjunct to it. Together, these papers support and contribute to David McNeill’s theory and methodology.The introductory chapter by Adam Kendon contextualizes McNeill’s perspective within a history of earlier gesture studies. Kendon’s own research, from the early 1970s on, has itself been foundational to the development of McNeill’s paradigm and his paper makes clear the historical foundations of all the work represented in the volume. The rest of the book is divided into two main sections, “Language and Cognition” and “Environmental Context and Sociality.” We might say that the work detailed in the chapters of the first section emphasizes the ‘intrapersonal plane’, while that in the second section emphasizes the ‘interpersonal plane’. The final section, “Atypical Minds and Bodies,” concerns lessons to be learned from studies of aphasic patients, autistic children, and artificial humans.

For authors and Table of Contents see:
http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=GS%201

David McNeill 2005 Gesture and Thought Chicago: Chicago University Press

Gesturing is such an integral yet unconscious part of communication that we are mostly oblivious to it. But if you observe anyone in conversation, you are likely to see his or her fingers, hands, and arms in some form of spontaneous motion. Why? David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, set about answering this question over twenty-five years ago. In Gesture and Thought he brings together years of this research, arguing that gesturing, an act which has been popularly understood as an accessory to speech, is actually a dialectical component of language. Gesture and Thought expands on McNeill’s acclaimed classic Hand and Mind. While that earlier work demonstrated what gestures reveal about thought, here gestures are shown to be active participants in both speaking and thinking. Expanding on an approach introduced by Lev Vygotsky in the 1930s, McNeill posits that gestures are key ingredients in an “imagery-language dialectic” that fuels both speech and thought. Gestures are both the “imagery” and components of “language.” The smallest element of this dialectic is the “growth point,” a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage. Utilizing several innovative experiments he created and administered with subjects spanning several different age, gender, and language groups, McNeill shows how growth points organize themselves into utterances and extend to discourse at the moment of speaking. An ambitious project in the ongoing study of the relationship of human communication and thought, Gesture and Thought is a work of such consequence that it will influence all subsequent theory on the subject.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Part 1. Preliminaries; Chapter 1. Why Gestures?; Chapter 2. How Gestures Carry Meaning
Part 2. Dialectic; Chapter 3. Two Dimensions; Chapter 4. Imagery-Language Dialectic
§4.1. Dialectic and Material Carriers; 4.2. The Growth Point; 4.3. Extensions of GP; 4.4. Social-Interactive Context; Chapter 5. Discourse; Chapter 6. Children and Whorf
Part 3. Brain and Origins; Chapter 7. Neurogesture; Chapter 8. The Thought-Language-Hand Link and Language Origins
Appendix. Methods of Gesture Recording and Transcription, Including New Semiautomated Methods
Plus “The Growth Point”—A Poem.
References
Index
For details:
http://mcneilllab.uchicago.edu/projects/projects.html

Shaun Gallagher 2005 How the Body Shapes the Mind Oxford: Oxford University Press

Barbara J. King, 2004 The Dynamic Dance: Nonvocal Communication in the African Great Apes Harvard University Press

In this book, Barbara King discusses gesture of chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, and the relationship of ape gesture to human language. Mother and infant negotiate over food; two high-status males jockey for power; female kin band together to get their way. It happens among humans and it happens among our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, the great apes of Africa. In this eye-opening book, we see precisely how such events unfold in chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas: through a spontaneous, mutually choreographed dance of actions, gestures, and vocalizations in which social partners create meaning and come to understand each other.

Using dynamic systems theory, an approach employed to study human communication, Barbara King is able to demonstrate the genuine complexity of apes' social communication, and the extent to which their interactions generate meaning. As King describes, apes create meaning primarily through their body movements--and go well beyond conveying messages about food, mating, or predators. Readers come to know the captive apes she has observed, and others across Africa as well, and to understand "the process of creating social meaning."

This new perspective not only acquaints us with our closest living relatives, but informs us about a possible pathway for the evolution of language in our own species. King's theory challenges the popular idea that human language is instinctive, with rules and abilities hardwired into our brains. Rather, The Dynamic Dance suggests, language has its roots in the gestural "building up of meaning" that was present in the ancestor we shared with the great apes, and that we continue to practice to this day.

For details:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/KINDYN_R.html

Adam Kendon, 2004. Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Contents:
1. The domain of gesture; 2. Visible action as gesture; 3. Western interest in gesture from classical antiquity to the eighteenth century; 4. Four contributions from the nineteenth century: Andrea de Jorio, Edward Tylor, Garrick Mallery and Wilhelm Wundt; 5. Gesture studies in the twentieth century: recession and return; 6. Classifying gestures; 7. Gesture units, gesture phrases and speech; 8. Deployments of gesture in the utterance; 9. Gesture and speech in semantic interaction; 10. Gesture and referential meaning; 11. On pointing; 12. Gestures of the 'precision-grip': topic, comment and question markers; 13. Two gesture families of the open hand; 14. Gesture without speech: the emergence of kinesic codes; 15. Gesture and sign on common ground; 16. Gesture, culture and thec ommunication economy; 17. The status of gesture; Appendix I. Transcription conventions; Appendix II. The recordings.)

Nevile, Maurice. 2004. Beyond the black box: talk-in-interaction in the airline cockpit. Aldershot: Ashgate. (In a new series: Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Series editors D.Francis and S.Hester.)

An airline pilot and researcher in 'aviation human factors' once described the goal of all airline pilots as "to get people from A to B without killing them": this book explores the place of talk-in-interaction in pilots' achievement of this laudable goal. The book uses video data of pilots at work on regular scheduled passenger flights to study routine talk-in-interaction in the airline cockpit. It explores how, through processes of talk-in-interaction, pilots develop and make available to one another their situated and moment-to-moment understandings as they work together as a flight crew to perform necessary activities and tasks, and attend and respond to events and emerging circumstances. I consider how pilots establish what is going on around them, who knows what, who is doing what, and exactly where they are up to and what they are to do next. In this way the book throws light on what it is to be, accountably and recognisably, an airline pilot, and shows how every airline flight is not just a mechanical and technological triumph, and some would say miracle, but is also the outcome of human performance and interaction. The book joins a growing interest in interaction in workplace or institutional settings, and in particular joins recent studies which look in detail at interaction in sociotechnical settings where groups or teams coordinate their talk and non-talk activities to perform tasks and complete goals. It adds to findings of these studies on human cognition as situated, embodied, and socially shared, and in particular develops previous research on cognition in the airline cockpit. Detailed study of routine cockpit talk allows us to see just how the modern airline cockpit is both the epitome of the high technology workplace, with its bewildering array of computers, displays, buttons, switches, dials, levers and lights, and also very much a setting for human interaction.

Contents
The workplace as social interaction. Part I: 'I'll Take Climb Power.' Accomplishing Cockpit Identities Through Pronominal Language: Accomplishing cockpit identities: (1) prescribed pronominal forms; Accomplishing cockpit identities: (2) non-prescribed pronominal forms. Part II: 'That's Set.' Coordinating Talk and Non-Talk Activity: Accomplishing takeoff tasks; Managing tasks in flight. Part III: 'He Said Final Approach Speed.' Integrating Talk-In-Interaction Within and Beyond the Cockpit: Talking with controllers: (1) pilot–pilot talk occasioned by talk with controllers; Talking with controllers: (2) abstaining from pilot–pilot talk about talk with controllers; Conclusion and implications; References; Index.

For details:
http://www.paultenhave.nl/nbooks.htm#Nevile
http://www.ashgate.com

Papers and Reviews