Abstract
The purpose of this study is to establish the method of conversational gesture corpus analysis (CGCA), which integrates multimodal corpus linguistics (MCL) with conversation analysis (CA), to investigate Japanese learners’ strategic use of gestures in English conversations, especially in ‘repair’ sequences. The study compares how Japanese advanced learners of English and basic-level learners use hand gestures in pair conversations. CGCA was applied to investigate: (1) the word count and time lengths of speaker turns, (2) the frequency and functions of hand gestures, and (3) the use of gestures in repair sequences, comparing the two levels. Some differences were observed, i.e. the advanced learners self-repaired with metaphoric gestures, while the basic learners other-repaired with iconic gestures. The method made it possible to gain an overview of a global pattern of the temporal relationship between speech and gestures from which specific cases were selected for micro-analysis.
