Speaker 1: Hey everyone, I'm Danielle Harkins and I had the pleasure of working with Abigail Maria for this assignment. And for our presentation, since we're both interested in the influence of nonverbal communication on the interpersonal exchange of messages, we're obviously interested in second language acquisition. So this article that we chose is called The Role of Gestures and Facial Cues in Second Language Listening Comprehension by Ayana Tsuyoshi and Debra M. Hardison. So this seemed like a great fit for us. So to dive right in, these authors illustrate that nonverbal communication, specifically gestures, can facilitate comprehension of a spoken message for listeners and convey thoughts not present in speech. And they wanted to investigate further this influence on the speakers of different languages. So this definitely comes from a sociocultural perspective for Vygotsky. So the purpose of their study was to assess the contribution of gestures and facial cues, soliciting comprehension by a load of intermediate and advanced learners of English as a second language, and to survey their attitudes towards visual cues and language skill development and face-to-face communication. Whew. So to dive into the review of literature, they had a lot of categories that were all over the place. So that's actually the first weakness that we identified was that this review of literature could have really used some organization from the reader's perspective. The rest of the study is really well laid out and has like subheadings for everything, but we kind of had to go through and like reorganize it to make it make sense for you all and try to put it into a cohesive presentation here. So the categories that we came up with were the overall influence of visual or lip read information on speech perception, and this comes from McGurk. And then in regard to gestures, they were looking for several different things. The types of hand gestures used, the function of gestures and verbal messages, function of gestures and facial cues and language development, especially gestures indicating language development, positive effect on listening. So the strengths was that there was a very comprehensive review of literature here. I almost feel like they might have fed off more than they can chew, but they were very thorough, let's say that. And then the weakness, obviously I said it was disorganized, and it was missing additional detail about cultural influences on nonverbal communication, since nonverbal really does vary from culture to culture. Like I teach public speaking for a living, I teach interpersonal communication, and we talk about it all the time, how like you go to a different country and use a hand gesture and like people look at you weird or maybe look a little bit offended. So I really feel like a lot of times if we're teaching English as a second language, that we're also having like some sort of multicultural encounter. So that just, it would have made sense to develop that a little bit more. They briefly touched on it, but they didn't go into great detail. So for the visual influence, McGurk and McDonald came up with this perceptual illusionary effect. And it's actually the McGurk effect, it's like, you got to have a last name like McGurk to get away with that and have people remember it. So he did a few studies over the years, Massaro adds to that, that speech information can be acquired without direct fixation of one's gaze, kind of just looking in general at someone's face would pick up a lot from that. Changes in speech, facial muscles in conjunction with changes in vocal tract may contribute to linguistic information. So we're not just listening to a message, we are watching someone, and a lot of that message can be conveyed in the nonverbal. There's seven or eight different categories of nonverbal communication codes, like proxemics, haptics, kinesics. So that's all the ways that we use our face and our gestures. So that's really what this study was going for, was looking at the visual influence. And they even found a study that Japanese students who lived in the US for more than two years reported that they looked more at the faces of people as a result of this experience, which helped them to use visual information to facilitate comprehension. I can relate to this personally too, if I'm really having a hard time understanding someone's message, if I like watch their mouth and kind of see what's going on with their gestures, I feel like it's a little bit easier for me to pick up what they might be trying to say, or I'm just totally lost and just have to move on. So when it comes to gestures, the role of hand gestures is they represent an interactive element during communication. The majority are produced along with utterances and are linked semantically, prosthetically, and pragmatically. To note, there's five different types, iconic, beat, metaphoric, representational, and daedic. I'll let you go ahead and do some research on those on your own if you're really interested. And then the functions of gestures and verbal messages, they found that the role of gestures are facilitators to what a speaker intends to say. And they also help negotiate meaning and help speakers to recall lexical items faster. So that was really interesting. And finally, interaction of available cues in a story, retelling tasks with native speakers of English, was that gestures lended to verbal messages. More about gestures. Yeah, that's kind of what we're talking about today. So the function of facial cues and gestures and language development for that category, the iconic and beat gestures had a strong correlation with children's language development. ESL children comprehended much less gestural information than the native speakers. So again, coming back to that idea that this is culturally dependent, and I think it would be really interesting to dig deeper into the multicultural element here, but that's for future studies. That's one of the limitations, right? They can address that later. Interactions offer students opportunity to receive comprehensible input and feedback and to make modifications to their output based on who they're speaking with and what kind of gestures are being used. And then introducing gestures in language learning also improves the social pragmatic competence of L2 learners. I can think back to learning Spanish in high school, and I felt like there was something in the water that all the Spanish instructors were really kind of above the top and seemed really dramatic. But now that I'm thinking about it, I'm like, oh, they were probably just really emphasizing their use of gestures for the benefit of the learner. So my high school Spanish teachers were onto something, and that was long before this study was conducted. Learners also use more gestures when they're producing L2 English than their L1s. I thought that was really interesting to learn. And then oral production drives gesture production, positive effect of visual gestures on students' comprehension during a storytelling in an ESL class at a primary school. And Mexico has had a positive effect, and teachers can provide gestural input to learners too. There was a lot going on there. We really, just like every single thing that occurred in the review of literature. So the effects on listening. Listening becomes more active when accompanied by visual emotions. This is where they identified the cultural differences, but they just provided these three. On a study that's working with ESL learners or L2 learners, I would think that there would be more emphasis on the cultural part. So these are the research questions they were going after. Does access to visual cues such as gestures and lip movements facilitate ESL students' listening and comprehension? Does proficiency level affect the learners' preference for visual cues and communication in their choice of activities for the development of listening and speaking skills and vocabulary? And does proficiency level affect the perception of gestures in general and participants' own gesture use with L1 and L2? In terms of the methods that they used here, they had adult ESL learners from ages 18 to 27. They had 29 women, 13 men. Their L1 was mostly Korean with a few folks that spoke Japanese and one person of each for Chinese, Thai, and Italian. They were enrolled in an intensive English program or English for academic purposes course at a Midwestern university in the U.S. I bet it was MSU, but that's just my guess based on where the authors are from. Voluntarily participated in this outside of class, and there was just the two proficiency levels involved. So the strengths, there's a good mix of folks. The weaknesses, I think the small sample size for cross-sectional study and for a quantitative study. So they could have had a larger body of people they were pulling from. The materials, they used a video recording of a graduate teaching assistant using gesturing. So they had her record two different videos. One was... I don't know how I'm speaking to you folks right now, you can really just see my face. Another one was further back and they accounted for a lot of hand gestures. So they actually played these for students while they had a listening task. So they had like something they were supposed to fill out for a comprehension check, but they had three different groups. They had one watch the video with the gestures and facial expressions. One group watched the video with just facial expressions and one just listened to the audio. So they were really after how well the students remembered stuff. So they did the listening task right afterwards. And then after the study was complete or after the clips had been played, they had them fill out a questionnaire just to give their demographic information. So that's how they collected that. So strengths, there was a nice use of three groups providing good diversity within the study. The weaknesses, this is a listening task and the opportunity for spoken output is not provided, which is actually like pretty important for the listening process to be able to have the time, the opportunity to practice. So I personally thought that was a weakness. Coming back to the sociocultural study, the interpersonal interaction is one-sided here. They're just watching a video or listening to a video, they're not interacting. So I guess genuine learning wasn't what they were concerned with, but I'm here looking for strengths and weaknesses. Next up, we've got Abigail. She's going to lead you through the results and the discussion and the conclusion. So take it away, Abigail.