Teachers' perception of the application of gestures in TEFL classroom

In modern classrooms, the emphasis is still put on the four essential skills (reading, listening, writing and speaking). Therefore, an important part of the multimodality of language and communication is excluded, and learners may not reach their potential communicative competence. One of the excluded modes of communication are gestures, i.e. hand and body movement that accompany the speech and provide further information. It seems that gestures are rarely the selected focus in TEFL classrooms due to their subconscious and automatic nature, even though they are an important factor in the facilitation of communication. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to examine the teachers’ perception of the application of gestures in TEFL classroom. Therefore, a qualitative study involving Croatian teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) was conducted and its primary aim was to investigate the extent to which they report to use gestures in classrooms. Our expectation was that teachers would concede that they rarely focus on gestures but, after raising their awareness of the importance of gestures, teachers would become interested in them, and results showed that: a) teachers do not focus on the use of gestures, and b) they are willing to incorporate gestures in their classes. Furthermore, this thesis contains a section about The Distributed Little Red Hen Lab (Red Hen Lab), which is a global laboratory and consortium for research into multimodal communication and gestures