Utilisation du geste illustratif par les apprenants coréens dans la classe de langue

The purpose of this contribution is to identify and analyze the gestures used by Korean learners addressed to their French teacher in the context of French as a foreign language courses at the university in South Korea. For this analysis of learner practices, we will use the functional categorization of gestures established by Cosnier (1982, 1997), in which we will retain the communicative co-verbal illustrative gestures. We will also recall the dimensions defined by McNeill (1992, 2005). We’ll focus on the many illustrative gestures, mainly iconic and deictic, revealing the discursive and cultural specificities of Korean learners in their interactions with French teachers. We have tried to see how the body of participants in the exchange co-constructs discourse and meaning in this situation, which may lead to misunderstanding and incomprehension. For that purpose, we analyzed for each example, the teacher's reaction to the learner’s gesture to see if the intention of the learner was understood and the way he managed the exchange.Our study reveals a preponderance of illustrative gestures in the context of learning French, which can be explained by the need to rephrase, to clarify the contain of the statements, or even to overcome a language gap. We have identified apparently intentional gestures which were performed to illustrate the verbal discourse (applaudir, pigeon, boire, billard, étudier, rire). Mostly iconic, these gestures of lexical verification and lexical compensation revealed socio-cultural specificities. These peculiarities appeared on with the use of an exolingual lexicon which is not shared (Pocketball, CEO) or culturally influenced gestures (small glass of alcohol, interjection Hoho). Furthermore, throughout the corpus we have identified many deictic gestures that provide the primary function of designation. But sometimes these gestures go further because they replace a verbal form that would be complex to produce in the target language ("My sister is the same age as Suji", "You made an imprudent marriage"). They can no longer be considered as mere pointing gestures.All the illustrative co-verbal gestures of Korean learners thus seem to be part of a communicative strategy to overcome discursive and grammatical problems, as Gullberg (2005) pointed out. And it also allows them to respect the tacit contract banning the use of the native language in the classroom during a foreign language course. If they are sometimes indicative of a culture, the gestures performed by the learners are usually taken over by the teachers and adapted to their own representation of the world, as a reformulation of what is being said.