Issues in Applied Linguistics

This paper investigates the role of gesture in instruction giving and in instruction receiving during a cooking lesson. Gestures and embodied actions are not entirely a speaker's phenomenon but are oriented to and also used by listeners as well. We will focus primarily on the recipient and his/her orientation to verbal and embodied instruction giving.

Instructions are broken down into smaller sequences (Wright & Hull, 1990). This paper analyzes three relevant next actions which can follow the instruct turn: (1) embodied instinct receipt tokens (head nod); (2) embodied repetition of the embodied instruct; and (3) repair.

In general, an embodied action can be coined as an "embodied instruct". And once understood as such by all participants, it is available to all participants in subsequent sequences. Thus an embodied gesture can "travel" from one participant to another.