Porovnanie gest učiteľky počas hodiny slovenského jazyka a geometrie na prvom stupni základnej školy
Comparison of teacher’s gestures during Slovak language and during Geometry lesson in primary education

Summary/Abstract: The subject of interest of the presented case study was to observe, how the topic of the lesson and the age of pupils influenced non-verbal communication, specifically the gestures of a class teacher. We compared two video recordings of regular school lessons: Slovak language lesson lasting 39 minutes, 73 seconds, taught in the third grade and Geometry lesson lasting 35 minutes, 19 seconds, taught in the fourth grade, both rewritten in the CHAT system. Following J. Mistrík (1997) we classified the teacher’s auto-semantic gestures as deictic, iconic, symbolic, and contact. We also registered adaptors according to DeVito (2008). Our analysis shows that the teacher observed used significantly more gestures during Slovak language lesson than during geometry lesson. We assume that the age of pupils was also significant and relevant factor, which influenced the amount of teacher’s gestures. This is evidenced by more deictic gestures, a typical marker of subregister of teacher’s speech directed to young pupils, mostly aimed at the blackboard or interactive whiteboard pointing at the subject taught during Slovak language lesson. Moreover, there was two times higher number of symbolic and contact gestures and three times higher number of iconic gestures directed to pupils in the third grade in comparison with the number of gestures directed to pupils in the fourth grade. The most common adaptor used by the teacher in both lessons was adjusting the face mask as lessons were recorded during corona virus pandemics.

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