VISIBLE BODILY ACTION IN DISFLUENCIES WHEN LEARNING TO SIGN: A CLASSROOM STUDY OF NON-NATIVE SIGN LANGUAGE

In this paper, I examine the role of visible bodily action in a French Sign Language (FSL) classroom. With data from an authentic production exercise, I analyse how a novice signer communicates with her body to simultaneously produce utterances in FSL for a camera while maintaining a pedagogical interaction with her instructor. With frame-by-frame microanalyses of two examples, I use ELAN transcriptions and drawings to illustrate how the student deploys various aspects of visible bodily action to overcome her disfluencies and make progress in learning to sign. Although preliminary, my findings offer new insights to non-native signing in a classroom and highlight the role of multimodality in language learning.