Abstract:
There appears to be a weak alignment between manuals on using hand gestures
in oral presentations, theoretical sources on gesture production, and empirical
studies on dimensions of gesture processing and use. Much of the advice in
presentation skills manuals centre on prohibitions regarding undesirable postures
and gestures. Furthermore, these sources tend to focus on the intentions, feelings
and mental states of the speakers as well as the psychological effect of gestures
on the audience. Theoretical sources, on the other hand, typically emphasise
the relationship between speech and gestures, and the mental processing of
the latter, especially representational gestures. Quasi-experimental empirical
research studies, in turn, favour the description and analysis of iconic and
metaphorical gestures, often with specific reference to gesturing in the retelling
of cartoon narratives. The purpose of this article is to identify main areas of
misalignment between practical, theoretical and empirical sources, and provide
pointers on how the advice literature could align guidelines on gesture use with
theory and research. First, I provide an overview of pertinent gesture theories,
followed by a discussion of partially canonised typologies that describe gestures
in relation to semiotic gesture types, handedness (left, right or both hands),
salient hand shapes and palm orientation, movement, and position in gesture
space. Subsequently, I share the results of a qualitative analysis of the advice
on gesture use in 17 manuals on presentation skills. I then report on an analysis
of the co-speech gestures in a corpus of 17 video-recorded audio-visual
presentations by students of Theology. The article is concluded by proposing
an outline for advice on gestures that is based on a considered integration of
traditional advice in guide books and websites, theory, and empirical research.
