This study investigates how teachers’ gestures, talk, and small shifts in classroom space work together to organise interaction and support vocabulary learning in Indonesian senior high school English lessons. Two questions frame the study: 1) How does the coordinated use of physical gestures and speech by teachers function as multimodal semiotic tools that mediate classroom interaction and engagement during vocabulary instruction? (2) How do physical gestures and spatial movements within classroom interaction act as culturally situated semiotic resources that facilitate students’ vocabulary deep learning and classroom-observable spoken production development? Using a design-based research design across two iterative cycles in one private urban school (five teachers; 170 students), the study analyzes naturalistic lesson video coded in ELAN and triangulated with field notes, teacher reflections/interviews, and brief student responses. Episodes were segmented into instructional sequences and analyzed with multimodal interaction analysis, to track how multimodal moves create response slots and stabilize reference. Claims are grounded in repeated sequential patterns and in learners’ uptake and reuse.
Across lessons, the dominant interactional finding is a repeatable coordination package that makes new items “seeable and sayable” at the moment of instruction. Teachers commonly (a) establish a public locus (board, screen, object) and align gaze through deictic pointing; (b) depict core meaning with compact iconic/metaphoric strokes timed to naming; and (c) pace multi-step explanations with low-amplitude beats that project where the next unit will begin and end. These resources operate as a single utterance: pointing stabilizes reference, depiction thickens meaning, and rhythm segments procedure, reducing ambiguity while keeping whole-class tempo intact.
A second dominant finding concerns participation design. Calm interactive cues (open palms, nods, brief thumbs-up feedback) open response slots without interrupting the speaker, while brief step-ins, lean-ins, and step-backs regulate access to the floor. In the focal episodes, proxemics contributes by making entry conditions legible so invitations land as low-pressure opportunities rather than as demands.
Learning is traced through interactional indicators rather than tests. When these coordinated packages appear, the subsequent talk more often shows timely uptake, cleaner first attempts, longer and smoother turns, fewer hesitations/repairs, and retrieval or reuse of target items in the next turn or task. Over time, students increasingly appropriate parts of the repertoire, suggesting embodied internalisation in which public semiotic tools become personally deployable resources for recall, pacing, and turn construction.
Finally, the study shows that embodied orchestration is culturally and institutionally situated. Politeness, hierarchy, and togetherness norms shape gesture amplitude, stepping distance, and the preference for clustered participation, while institutional pacing and classroom layout constrain how far bodies can move and how long attention can linger. These conditions help explain why the same verbal prompt can produce different participation outcomes depending on how it is embodied in space and time. This study demonstrates that learnable vocabulary moments in Indonesian senior high school ELL classrooms are produced through a function-first orchestration of gesture, speech, and micro-proxemics that stabilises attention, reference, pacing, and access to the floor, yielding observable uptake, reuse, and more fluent learner turns. |