Gestural Silence: An engagement device in the multimodal genre of the chalk talk lecture

This chapter reports on a study of multimodal engagement strategies used by instructors while performing chalk talk, the genre of university mathematics lecture. Relying on multimodal data, the study examines how university mathematics instructors engage students in chalk talk through gestures, writing on the chalkboard, and speech. One of the engagement strategies identified in the study is the use of gestural silence, or the absence of the instructor’s hand movement, intended to engage students in doing mathematics. The study indicates that such multimodal engagement strategies appear to be shaped by the embodied nature of discipline-specific genres.