Doctoral candidate Nghia Minh Nguyen and Kimberly Urbanski, Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, led a colloquium titled The Impact of Pedagogy on Teacher Mediation and Gesture for Multilinguals at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2023 (Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy (PED) strand).

Minh and Dr. Urbanski drew on the research conducted for 14 weeks in a French narrative literacy class. They coded the teacher’s gesture dimensions and conducted conversation analysis and microgenesis. Minh and Dr. Urbanski said: “We conclude that the nature of the pedagogy had greater impact on the teacher’s gesture than the learners’ L1 and discuss the importance of gesture as a semiotic resource in an inclusive pedagogy for multilinguals’ literacy development.“