Meaning-Making through Gesticulations in the Story-Telling Enterprise: An Exploratory Case Study of One Iranian Child

This investigation is an exploratory study of one participant as an endeavor to appraise children in the integration of gesture and speech into one another to create co-speech gestures, i.e. gesticulations (McNeill, 2005) while telling a story in their native language. This study adopts a case study approach in order to obtain a more in-depth understanding of how meaning is mediated during a child’s story-telling in the mother tongue. In this vein, as a discourse analysis, concentrating on Hodge and Kress’s (1988) theoretical framework, which associates and mingles semiotics with teaching contexts, this investigation dissects the co-speech gestures in the 6-year-old Kiamehr’s story-telling while wielding McNeill’s (2005) scheme or Kendon’s (2004) Continuum with four categories of iconic, metaphoric, deictic, and beat gesticulations as its analytical tool. Results exhibited how the creation of gesticulation by a child entails a sort of mediation between what is in the mind of the child and what is expressed to the audience, and how this mediation of gesticulations facilitates and clarifies the meaning in the child’s story-telling process, so that the audience can better comprehend the child’s intentions or stories. The findings have some implications for language teachers and researchers to understand the dialectic relationship of oral speech, and gesture in language during children’s story-telling process, and include some pedagogical implications to apply this knowledge into practice in the classroom.