Embodying the Teacher: Incorporating the Physical Self in Language Teacher Education

The body, gesture and voice are the tools of the language teacher. They are indispensable for the sharing of knowledge and classroom management, and as such become increasingly visible in the professional context. However, these professional multimodal skills are not inborn, and the young teacher may not necessarily know how to use these tools in the classroom. This article discusses the difficulties faced by future foreign and second language teachers in initial training in university contexts. We focus on the use of posture, gaze and hand gestures using corpus extracts collected during training sessions at the University of Aix-Marseille and the University of Oregon. From a detailed analysis of these video corpora, we show which aspects novice teachers can improve. The article also proposes methodological principles that can be offered to language teachers in initial training to optimize their use of the body in language teaching.