Pedagogical Activities Invite Students to Perceive Gesture as Knowledge in Public Speaking

It takes many skills to give a great oral presentation, yet what we mean by ‘skill’ and ‘great’ can differ immensely across theories, disciplines, and individuals. Such difference has implications for how we teach and assess our students in public speaking.

Consider the enthrallment in popular culture with TED Talks, where knowledgeable and experienced scholars are montaged with awe-inspiring visuals, their confident speaking style replete with appealing interactive gestures. Students are being taught that such gestures can captivate the audience’s attention and make the presentation resonate with the listeners. What students also need to know, more importantly, is that without preparation, knowledge, and experience of their topic, their performance of stylish gestures risks appearing superficial.

Research by Simon HARRISON, Assistant Professor of CityU’s Department of English, explores embodied and relational understandings of language, communication, and culture across diverse settings and scales. He has been interested in a wide range of topics that can be approached through the study of gesture. These include areas of English language studies and applied linguistics, such as classroom interactivity and English for Academic Purposes, which brought him to the topic of oral presentations and the perceived need for empirically-informed teaching materials about gesture.

In 2021, Prof Harrison published a research paper “Showing as sense-making in oral presentations: The speech-gesture-slide interplay in TED talks by Professor Brian Cox” (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2021.101002) in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. This study examined the stage work of one of the world’s best contemporary science communicators, focusing on how the ‘rock star physicist’ Brian Cox gestured relationally with images on slides while keeping the audience’s attention intact. Informed by the empirical findings, Harrison then developed and trialed classroom activities for teaching about gesture to students tasked with an assessed oral presentation, improving the materials with input from experienced language teachers at CityU. This led to a new research article published in the same journal describing the development process and sharing “Materials for an oral presentations class on gesture: Navigating a visual with your audience” (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2023.101328).

In the first classroom activity, students can be asked to watch a short clip of American President Donald Trump and to evaluate the speaker’s way of presenting his audience with the graph on his slides. The second activity takes its example from a TED talk by Prof Brian Cox. Similar to Trump, Cox will also be navigating a graph. What is not similar is the skill on display as Cox engages his audience with the details of the graph. Various activities follow that allow students to explore the different ways that Trump and Cox gesture while introducing their visual (Harrison, 2024, p.7):

1. Trump is initially unaware that his visual has appeared, whereas Cox embeds its appearance into his segue to the new topic;
2. Trump only looks at his audience once, whereas Cox only looks at his visual once;
3. Trump faces and gestures to his graph, whereas Cox faces his audience and gestures with them;
4. Whereas Trump’s gesturing is primarily deictic (pointing to referent), Cox’s gesturing is primarily depictive (creating or evoking their referent imagistically).

Students are guided to discover how these different ways of gesturing can be demonstrably related to the presenters’ situational awareness, content knowledge of the visual, and spoken language ability (in terms of grammatical complexity). The contrasts shown between the two presenters highlight that gesture is not only a tool to communicate content or direct the audience’s attention. Gesture is actually part of the content itself, the speaker’s personalised way of knowing the visual and making its ecological information available to the audience.
The pedagogical activities and materials presented in this paper contribute to the limited but expanding pool of specialised resources available for teachers of oral presentations being developed from different empirical and theoretical perspectives on gesture.

Achievement and publication

Harrison, S. 2024, ‘Materials for an oral presentations class on gesture: Navigating a visual with your audience ‘, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, vol. 67, 101328. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2023.101328

Harrison, S. 2021, ‘Showing as sense-making in oral presentations: The speech-gesture-slide interplay in TED talks by Professor Brian Cox’, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, vol. 53,101002. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2021.101002

(Article received Honourable Mention for the journal’s Ken Hyland Prize)