Using Syntactically Incomplete Structures and Visual Signs to Elicit Students’ Knowledge Display in CSL Classrooms: A Multimodal Perspective

This study investigates how teachers use language, body movements, and visual displays to seek students’ displays of linguistic knowledge in Chinese-as-a-second-language (CSL) classrooms. We focus on two types of multimodal practices used by CSL teachers. The first type of multimodal practice, [zhe(ge) shi ‘this is’ + image display], is used by teachers to elicit students to display lexico-semantic knowledge of lexical items representing concrete concepts. The second type of multimodal practice is in the form of [zhe(ge) shi ‘this is’ + character display]. It is utilized to elicit students to display their orthographic-phonological knowledge of lexical items representing abstract concepts. These two multimodal practices are employed in different sequential environments and pedagogical activities. Specifically, the first type of multimodal practice is used in the non-initial position of a vocabulary teaching activity, whereas the second type of multimodal practice is used at the beginning of a vocabulary teaching activity. This study shows how teachers use their language, body, and visual signs together to engage students in teaching vocabulary in CSL classrooms. The findings of the study have implications for abstract and concrete vocabulary teaching and multimodal classroom interactional research.