The cognitive-emotional dialectics in second language development: speech and co-speech gestures of Chinese learners of English
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Lixian Tian
,
Steven G. McCafferty
und
Man Zhu
Abstract
This study examines the cognitive-emotional dialectics of Chinese learners of English in terms of both speech and co-speech gestures in their second language development within the lens of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory. This qualitative study focuses on Chinese learners of English in different learning contexts and analyzes data from interviews and emotional narrative tasks in the English learning experience. Overall findings showed that learners’ emotion and cognition interacted in different learning contexts, and speech and co-speech gestures worked to influence the cognition-emotion dialectics in participant’s perezhivanie. This study implies the inextricable unity of emotion and cognition in second language development, and emphasizes the role of speech and co-speech gestures in shaping second language learners’ perezhivaniya.
Funding source: Social Science Foundation of the Hebei Province China
Award Identifier / Grant number: HB23JY019
Acknowledgments
We appreciate the efforts of the participants who were involved in the project. We also thank Gale Stam and Tetyana Smotrova for their feedback and suggestions in the initial stage of the project. Thanks Liang Qiu for his encouragement and suggestion in the writing process. We also thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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Ethical and legal declarations: The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Office of Research Integrity – Human Subjects in University of Nevada, Las Vegas, U.S. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study. We confirm that this study is in accordance with guidelines and regulations, and protocols approved by the Office of Research Integrity – Human Subjects. This study has not been published previously, except in the form of the first author’s doctoral dissertation. All authors approve the publication of this work and declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this study.
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Research funding: This work was supported by Social Science Foundation of the Hebei Province China (HB23JY019).
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