Gestures in Motion in TED Talks: Towards Multimodal Literacy

Multimodal literacy is gaining more and more importance in the contemporary society of screen-mediated communication and in educational settings in particular (Busá 2010; Walsh 2010; O’Halloran et al. forth.). TED Talks, as a case in point, have recently attracted interest and research from different perspectives (cf., inter alia, Caliendo and Compagnone 2014, Rasulo 2015, D’Avanzo 2014, 2015) including the pedagogical one (cf. Takaesu 2013). The analysis focuses on a selection of Talks from the domain of economics with the aim of exploring the interplay between verbal and non-verbal signals such as hand/arm gestures (also emphasized prosodically). The methodology employed for the analysis draws on Baldry and Thibault (2005), i.e. multimodal transcription accounting for and interpreting the relations between verbal texts and non-verbal behaviours. In more detail, the description of data follows an integrated method (Lazaraton 2004) leading to the identification of different pragmatic functions of co-speech gestures (Ekman 1980; McNeill 1992; Kendon 2004; Weinberg, Fukawa-Connelly, Wiesner 2013).