Doctoral project: Gestures in Swedish pronunciation teaching

The work not only aims to improve pronunciation teaching for learners of Swedish but also contributes to international research on the multimodal nature of spoken language.

Project information

Doctoral student
Federica Raschellà

Supervisor
Gilbert Ambrazaitis, Linnaeus University

Assistant supervisors
Frida Splendido, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Annika Anderson, Linnaeus University

Financier
Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation (Stiftelsen Marcus och Amalia Wallenbergs Minnesfond)

Timetable
September 2023 – September 2028

Subject
Swedish

More about the project

In this project, we investigate whether gestures can support pronunciation teaching. Language teachers often use different kinds of body movements to clarify how a language is pronounced. “Clapping the syllables,” for instance, can make learners more aware of speech rhythm, while a drawn-out horizontal hand movement can illustrate which sound should be pronounced as long – such as the difference between vila (“rest”) and villa (“villa/house”) in Swedish. It is also common to draw attention to how the lips are shaped when pronouncing vowels like y or ö.

Previous studies – although focusing on languages other than Swedish – have shown that gestures can facilitate the learning of new speech sounds. At the same time, our understanding of these effects remains very limited. Many factors play a role: which pronunciation feature is practiced, which gestures are used, whether it is only the teacher or also the learner who uses them, and how well the gestures are performed. The studies also differ in whether they test the learner’s own pronunciation or their perception of the pronunciation feature.

Almost all previous research in this area has moreover been carried out in laboratory settings. Such studies are usually short experiments where participants, one by one, watch a training video in which a teacher explains and demonstrates a pronunciation feature – with or without gestures. In this type of study, the use of gestures can be controlled very precisely, which makes it possible to provide clear answers to whether gestures affect pronunciation training. However, they cannot show whether the effects are long-lasting, or whether similar results can be achieved in a less controlled, authentic classroom environment.

For this reason, our project also examines the possible effects of gestures in classroom settings, and systematically compares these with results from controlled laboratory experiments. We are conducting a series of studies testing the effects of selected gestures on the learning of two phonological features of Swedish: the length contrast (as in vila – villa) and the vowel contrast i – y. Both are difficult for learners to master, but doing so makes speech more comprehensible and listener-friendly – two of the most important goals of pronunciation teaching today.

The project is unique in an international perspective, partly because we study the effects of gestures in authentic classroom environments, and partly because we take into account both learners’ own pronunciation and their perception of the two contrasts. In our laboratory studies, we also use eye tracking to examine whether learners perceive the contrasts. By studying where – and how quickly – they fixate during the experiment, we gain information about how they unconsciously process what they hear. This enables us to detect even small effects that would otherwise be difficult to capture by simply asking participants which word they heard.

Studying the role of gestures in pronunciation teaching has both an applied and a scientific purpose. On the one hand, the research is directly useful for developing pronunciation pedagogy – an area that remains relatively unexplored in the context of Swedish. On the other hand, it contributes to the broader international research field that examines the interaction between gesture and speech in human communication.

This project is part of a research project led by Gilbert Ambrazaitis and supported by the Linnaeus University Language, Cognition and Culture Lab (LiLa).

Read about the project on Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg foudation.