[The embodied mind: how gestures reveal conceptual fluency in the process of learning German as a foreign language]

Abstract

This paper aims at demonstrating how cognitive structures such as image schemas as well as conceptual metaphors are displayed in gestures produced by a German/Portuguese bilingual teacher and two Brazilian learners of German while discussing the meanings of particle and prefixed verbs. The lesson was videotaped, and gestures were annotated according to the Linguistic Annotation System for Gestures (LASG). The multimodal analysis of teacher-student interactions provides empirical evidence of embodied conceptual thinking, since the gestures found in these interactions portray image schemas and metaphorical mappings underneath the meanings of verbs, indicating that these structures are cognitively activated for interlocutors during the interaction. Moreover, the analysis of gestures sheds some light on cognitive aspects intrinsic to the L2 learning process, which corroborates the incorporation of concepts such as metaphorical competence and conceptual fluency in the L2 teaching and learning agenda.

Keywords:
German as a Foreign Language; particle and prefixed verbs; conceptual fluency; gestures studies; multimodality