Understanding Relations Between Gesture and Chronotope: Embodiment and Meaning-Making in a Second-Language Classroom

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the inter-relationship between Bakhtin’s (1981) chronotope and the role of gesture in meaning-making processes in second language development. Chronotope— a unity of time, space, and qualitatively new experience, has been applied to the study of K-12 classrooms in the field of education with the repeated caveat concerning identification difficulties (Brown & Renshaw, 2009). Using Vygotskian sociocultural psychology (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986), the present study explores how gesture, as a material carrier, embodies and materializes chronotopes. Implications include the pedagogical importance for teachers to identify chronotope-gesture relations and diverge from prescripted curriculums in meeting second language learners’ needs.