Teacher Multimodal Communication in Nursery School

Gestures, Objects, and Spaces: Exploring Teachers’ Multimodal

Communication in Nursery Schools
Ana Moreno-Núñez*1, Marta Casla1
1
Departamento Interfacultativo de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad
Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
*Facultad de Psicología, Calle Ivan Pavlov 6, 28049 Madrid, Spain. ana.moreno@uam.es
This study builds on the increasing evidence that the multimodal nature of adult-child
interactions and the use of objects play an important role in early linguistic development.
Most of these studies analyzed dyadic interactions at home, whereas few research has been
conducted in early childhood education and care settings. In this paper, we characterized the
multimodal nature of teachers’ communicative bids during classroom-based group
interactions in nursery schools. Observational data of circle-time activities was collected from
16 Spanish nursery school classrooms, comprising 16 teachers and 161 children between two
and three years of age. We analyzed teachers’ communicative bids (i.e., verbal utterances and
verbal-gestural bids) considering the frequency of use of different types of gestures, to whom
are they addressed (i.e. the whole group or a single child), the extent to which they involve the
use of objects, the classroom layout, and the relationship between the communicative bids and
the number of children that participated in each classroom. Teachers’ communication with
toddlers is highly multimodal and rely on different types of gestures, although the use of
objects in our sample was scarce. Descriptive analysis suggest that certain classroom layouts
may favor teachers’ use of some types of gestures over others. In this article, we discuss the
implications of both the use of objects and space for understanding how adults shape the
linguistic contexts of young children, and the potential opportunities and limitations they pose
for classroom interactions.
multimodality, circle time, early childhood education, gestures, materiality, space
Adults frequently interact with children according to organized and predictable instances that
are built around materiality (Alessandroni, 2023), thus promoting relevant experiences and
forms of behavior that are consistent with their cultural rules of use (Kärtner, 2018). During
the first years of life, children’s early experiences with the material world are co-constructed
through joint actions with others, in which they acquire an increasingly active role (Moreno-
Núñez et al., 2017). These material encounters are not limited, though, to the manipulative
exploration of objects, but must be considered from a broader perspective that also accounts
for the features of the context in which the interaction takes place, including the space and its
organization. While both space and materiality refer to complex concepts that even partially
overlap, in early childhood education studies space typically refers to the physical
environment of nursery schools, while materiality is understood as the physical qualities of
objects and elements of nature (Løkken & Moser, 2012). Therefore, space, materiality and
social interaction are entwined, as they all contribute to providing opportunities and limits for
human interaction.
While educational contexts, such as nursery schools, have proven to be an important niche for
the development of basic communication and social interaction skills, their operationalization
as part of the children’s early linguistic context is still limited. There is ample evidence of
how early communicative interactions between mothers and infants shape their linguistic
developmental trajectories. However, only a few studies describe the interactions that take
place outside the home context. Additionally, there is a clear imbalance in basic and applied
research in favor of the 3- to 6-year-old period, while studies on early childhood education
(i.e., under three years of age) are significantly scarce. Considering that early schooling is a
reality for most Western children, it is worth exploring its role in ensuring opportunities for
infants’ participation with other adults and peers (Pianta, 2016).
Depicting the educational reality of children should acknowledge how everyday
communicative instances in the classroom unfold, for which ecological research may be
particularly appropriate. To this goal, exploring how teachers’ pedagogical and
communicative practices are geared through materiality would allow us to identify not only
the resources they use and how they are structured, but also what kind of opportunities for
participation they promote and what the factors that may influence them are (Bautista et al.,
2020). The interrelationships between the adult's action and the children's responses could
contribute to our understanding of how these inhibit or promote children’s participation,
meaning-making and learning experiences. Hence, the overall purpose of our research is to
investigate the relationship between materiality and teacher use of communicative behaviors
(e.g., gestures) during group interactions in nursery school classrooms.

Language Developmental Contexts and Early Childhood Education

Despite its voluntary nature, early access to schooling has increased in recent years due to
new social and family realities. This has also been associated with a positive impact on
children's development (García et al., 2020), e.g., in their social competence and engagement
(Degotardi, 2021), especially when the education they receive is of high quality. Educational
quality in early childhood education is usually assessed in terms of criteria such as a high
level of teacher education and adequate resourcing for centers, that includes low adult-child
ratios and small group sizes (Vermeer et al., 2016). Low-ratio settings have been typically
associated with better opportunities for children to interact with adults, though a recent meta-
analysis suggests that their effects on children’s developmental outcomes are the result of
complex interactions between several variables, and that they might be compensated for larger
ratio situations through, for instance, the teacher’s professional competence (Dalgaard et al.,
2022).
In early childhood education, children's participation in their daily classroom routines has
proven to be an educational tool with extraordinary potential for the acquisition of
communicative competencies, as they get involved in their own educational process and the
generation and development of interactive spaces (Justice et al., 2018). Over the last few
decades, there has been a growth in research demonstrating the strong relationship between
child-directed speech (CDS) and early language development (Rowe & Snow, 2020). In a
similar way to mothers, teachers adjust the amount and complexity of their CDS according to
the age and diverse linguistic abilities of a varied group children (Cárdenas et al., 2020;
Degotardi, 2021; Justice et al., 2018). Indeed, recent research has stressed that each child’s
particular linguistic experience at school may also quantitatively and qualitatively differ from
that of their peers (Perry et al., 2018), even within the same group (Chaparro-Moreno et al.,
2019). This dynamic nature of teachers’ speech also accounts for the distribution of their talk
according to structural factors such as the classroom ratio (Degotardi et al., 2018) or whether
the interactions take place during structured activities (Soderstrom & Wittebolle, 2013) such
as circle time or shared reading. In fact, while children’s linguistic participation during these
group activities does not exceed 16% of the time (Torr, 2019), they seem to contain higher
concentrations of adults’ talk, as compared to other everyday school routines. Thus,
interactive activities could lead to a more homogeneous experience for each child (Chaparro-
Moreno et al., 2019), although the child’s linguistic growth could also be influenced by the
group size and the language skills of his or her peers (Degotardi, 2021).
In addition to interactive group activities, the use of objects and spaces to convey
communicative behaviors in early childhood is a powerful and effective pedagogical strategy,
with the potential to help children to engage in collective communicative interactions with
peers and adults. Regardless of who initiates the interactions, the way in which teachers guide
the course of the dialogues provides of structure to everyday conversations and encourage
children to make relationships with other ideas. However, the scarce knowledge about how
children's linguistic context is shaped outside home settings (Degotardi, 2021) requires further
exploration and should focus on how and under what circumstances the exchanges with other
people and the material world unfold.

Materiality and Multimodality in the Promotion of Interaction

The term materiality has been increasingly used when explaining the impact of things on
human experience, actions, and communication. However, its complex nature brings the study
of material and organizational structures of the early childhood classroom at the center of a
multidisciplinary juncture that includes areas such as architecture, geography, and social and
educational sciences (Løkken & Moser, 2012). This has broadened the focus on materiality by
not only examining the use of objects and artifacts or their physical qualities, but also other
elements such as the physical characteristics of the school context (for example, how the
classrooms look, or the furniture and outdoor spaces available) and their spatial organization.
Accordingly, ideas on materiality and spaces can therefore be seen as being constituted
through the interaction between educators and children, situated within the educational and
organizational framework of the activities in which they all participate. Importantly, material
characteristics determine, to a greater or lesser extent, the possibilities of experimentation and
participation of children and adults on the sensorimotor experience and the process of co-
construction of meanings.
Given the importance of the material environment, it seems relevant to explore the role that
materiality and spaces play in the educational practice of early childhood teachers, as this
allows for a deeper knowledge about daily experiences in the classroom. Although even
widespread pedagogical models, such as those based on the Montessori philosophy,
emphasize the importance of the material and structural context in children’s development,
there are relatively few studies that empirically explore its educational relevance and how it is
articulated in the child's everyday classroom routines. We believe that studying the impact of
these factors requires adopting a complex exploratory approach based on participation as a
tool for social construction (Berge, 2019). In this sense, the different practices that take place
in the school could help us to understand the foundations, materials and strategies on which
educators rely to enhance interaction and communication in the school.
We should also note that increasing evidence supports multimodality as a key feature of the
early communication system (Perniss, 2018). The coordination of multimodal actions has
been shown to be an important interaction tool for both adults (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow,
2009) and children (Wu & Gros-Louis, 2014). In particular, mother-child interactions have
largely informed the literature on communicative multimodality (Suanda et al., 2016),
showing how verbal and gestural-coordinated utterances occupy an important place in
facilitating and shaping children's communicative developmental trajectories (Rodrigo et al.,
2006; Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2012). Moreover, adults’
gestures directed to children are usually accompanied by verbal utterances and rarely occur
alone (Iverson & Thelen, 1999). Their frequent use of verbal-gestural bids also seems to drive
children's multimodal behaviors (Rodrigo et al., 2006), as well having a predictive value in
their subsequent language skills (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009; Tamis-LeMonda et al.,
2012).
Even though this is a widely observed trend, some studies highlight certain differences in
adults' use of gestures that, consequently, indicate the diversity of linguistic contexts to which
children are exposed. On the one hand, cultural factors underlying parenting practices could
explain some of these differences since, for instance, Latino mothers tend to use more
gestures when interacting with their children than mothers from African-American
backgrounds (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2012). On the other hand, the use of gestures may vary
according to their type and whether or not they involve the use of objects. More specifically,
deictic gestures, especially pointing, tend to be the most frequent gestures in mothers (Tamis-
LeMonda et al., 2012) and, together with instrumental gestures, are significantly more
frequently used to interact with their children at 12, 24 and 36 months than symbolic and
social gestures (Rodrigo et al., 2006). However, since most of these studies have focused on
mother-child interactions, their potential similarities, and differences with children's linguistic
experiences in school settings remains underexplored. One exception is the study conducted
by White et al. (2015), showing that teachers’ use of gestures elicited more children’s
responses than solely verbal utterances. Although this study did not distinguish among the
types of gestures, teachers may use gestures differently to accompany their verbal utterances
in order to convey diverse meanings adjusted to the characteristics of materiality.
Although variables such as classroom ratios, child age, and teacher professional development
have been identified as some of those that might correlate with teacher language (Degotardi et
al., 2018), there are still many unanswered questions about the language environment to
which young children are exposed. For instance, it is important to analyze the extent to which
objects are part of those interchanges, as well as within-group (Chaparro-Moreno et al., 2019
and between-group variations (Hindman et al., 2021) in the linguistic experiences of the
children. The role of space in the use of different communicative behaviors is especially
interesting in nursery schools, where teachers simultaneously interact with children whose
linguistic abilities usually differ. For example, structured activities such as circle time might
bring good examples of how teachers shape a meaningful learning space for every child,
ensuring the provision of opportunities for communicative and social participation. To the
best of our knowledge, research with observational studies focused on the school linguistic
environment of non-English-speaking countries is very scarce (Degotardi, 2021). The
potential variations in the interactions analyzed here could cast light on the role of teachers’
speech in early linguistic development.

Aims
The overall purpose of our research was to explore the characteristics of teachers’
communicative bids during classroom-based group interactions in nursery schools. To this
goal, we explored the quantitative and qualitative variations of teachers’ multimodal
coordination based on (1) the frequency of use of gestures and their different types, (2) the
extent to which they involve the use of objects and are related to the classroom layout, (3) to
whom each communicative bid was addressed (i.e., the whole group or a single child) and, (4)
its relations with the teacher-student ratio. We expected the number of children in the
classroom could be related to the multimodal nature of teachers’ communicative bids, the use
of objects and the frequency of group-directed utterances. We also expected specific
configurations of gestures, the use of objects and the classroom layout to be coordinated with
the verbal utterances directed to the children. In particular, we considered that some
classroom layouts might favor greater opportunities for group-directed communicative bids,
while other layouts might be more inviting to address children in one-to-one interactions.
Method
Participants
This study involved 16 female teachers in charge of 16 classrooms across six public nursery
schools in middle-income urban areas of the Madrid region (Spain) and 161 children
attending the 2–3 years classrooms. Nursery schools were selected from an intentional
sampling based on previous contacts of the research team. Children’s mean age was 29.33
months (SD = 3.9 months). The number of children per classroom ranged from six to 15 (M =
10.06).

Procedure
Prior to data collection, two researchers conducted a participatory observation in each
classroom to familiarize the children with them and the recording equipment. They took field
notes on the way teachers conducted circle time activities that, in Spanish nursery schools, are
considered as a daily opportunity for promoting communication and group bonding. They are
similarly structured in different nursery schools, typically including rounds of presentations,
singing, storytelling and/or book-reading, which ensured that all sessions were comparable.
Circle time activities were selected because as structured routines they account for higher
proportions of CDS and could promote more homogeneous and frequent interactions between
children and teachers than other school activities (Chaparro-Moreno et al., 2019; Soderstrom
et al., 2018).
After the initial observation, the researchers filmed activities by placing two video cameras
attached to a tripod, one oriented towards the group of children and the other to the teacher,
who also wore a wireless microphone. This ensured that the recording angle and sound
allowed for the subsequent identification of their actions. Teachers did not receive any
instructions on how to act so as to preserve the ecological conditions of interaction. Overall,
we collected over 4 hours of footage in videos with a mean duration of 18.13 min (SD = 6.62
min).

Data Coding
Video files were imported into ELAN, an annotation tool for audio and video recordings
(Lausberg & Sloetjes, 2009), where we coded teachers’ communicative bids (i.e. each verbal
or gestural attempt to communicate with the children). Teachers’ verbal speech was
transcribed according to the CHAT program of the CHILDES project (MacWhinney, 2000),
and divided into utterances. Following Bernstein Ratner and Brundage (2015), an utterance or
conversational unit is a string of words that ends with a terminal intonation contour, has a
complete grammatical structure, or is followed by a pause longer than 2 seconds. We also
coded teachers’ communicative bids using predefined categories devised from previous
studies (Murillo et al., 2018; Rodrigo et al., 2006). A detailed list of the categories,
subcategories, and related examples can be found in Table 1. This included the type of
communicative bids, the uses of object and the types of gestures. Additionally, we coded
interactive instances according to whether the utterances were addressed to a single child
(dyadic) or to the group (polyadic), and also accounted for structural variables such as the
classroom layout and the number of children in the classroom. A second researcher
independently coded 15% of the recordings (3 out of 16 sessions). Inter-observer agreement
ranged from 89% to 99%, indicating a substantial or almost perfect degree of agreement
(Landis & Koch, 1977) between coders for the use of gestures (89%), the orientation of the
communicative bid (89%), and the use of objects (99%). Disagreements between the
researchers were discussed to refine the categories for future studies.
Table 1

Teachers’ behavioral categories used in this study

Categories Subcategories Examples

Type of communicative bid Verbal: Verbal utterances of the teacher. Posing a question to the group such as
“What is the weather like today?”.

Gestural: Gestures of the teacher. Putting her hand on her head in a

gesture of surprise, in response to a
child that told her about something that
happened to him the day before.

Verbal-Gestural: Combined bids of Greeting each child by saying “Hello!”

speech and gesture. while waving her hand.

Uses of object With object: utterances performed while Showing an object to present it to the
holding an object and in reference to it group or pointing to a character in a
book while shared-reading.

Without object: unrelated utterances to During shared-reading, posing verbal

an object. utterances referring to tangentially
related topics that were not explicitly
pictured in the book.

Type of gestures: Pointing: gestures that indicate a distal Pointing to her ear and saying to the
Any meaning-loaded motor referent. We considered as pointing all group "Let's listen to her, please",
actions used to communicate gestures performed either with an index referring to a girl who is intervening at
with others about a referent finger extension, the whole arm, a head that moment.
or event. movement or pointing with the chin.

Instrumental: gestures performed either Showing to the children a picture book

to show the object to the interlocutor, to she chose and seeking their approval
request an object that is out of reach or before starting to read it.
to transfer the object to someone else.
Following Rodrigo et al., (2006) this
includes showing, reaching, and giving
gestures.

Rhythmic: speech-accompanying Clapping to the beat of a song while the

gestures that emphasize the rate of children dance around.
language. They generally are harmonic
repetitions of the speech utterance.

Conventional: gestures and social Nodding to express agreement or

routines that are culturally defined. waving to say goodbye.

Symbolic: gestures that represent absent With the arms extended, clapping the
referents or actions. They have a hands in front of the body in
motivate relationship with what they representation of a crocodile’s mouth.
represent.

Orientation of the Dyadic: utterances directed to a single Asking a specific child “Who woke you
communicative bid child. up today?”.

Polyadic: utterances directed to the While looking for a book that she
group. They were defined as polyadic if: wanted to use, the teacher asked the
a) the content of the speech was clearly children “Where's the one about walking
directed to the group, b) there were down the road, kids?”.
vocatives or second person forms in
Categories Subcategories Examples

plural, c) teachers’ gaze was directed to

the group, d) teachers’ actions referred
to the group.

Classroom layout Circle: all children and the teacher were

sitting in circle.

Line: the teacher sat in front of the

children, sitting in line.

L-shape: the teacher was sitting in front

of the children, who sat forming an L.

Undefined: all children and the teacher

sat anywhere in the space, not following
a specific order.

Note: For classroom layout examples, we used a dark dot to represent the teacher spatial disposition, while the children are
represented in grey color dots.

Data Analysis
Data wrangling and the calculation of descriptive statistics were performed using SPSS. We
analyzed each type of teachers’ utterances by calculating (1) the mean proportion of each type
of communicative bid over the total number of communicative bids, and (2) the mean rate per
minute (rate/min) of each type of communicative bid. While proportions allow for a general
picture of the distribution of each type of bid, their rate/min was considered a better measure
due to the different length of the video files. Furthermore, since this dependent variable
ensures the independence principle, it was used for comparing the three types of
communicative bid (verbal, gestural or a combination of both) through a repeated-measures
ANOVA where each type was considered as an intrasubject factor. The same procedure was
utilized to explore the distribution of uses of object, of each type of gesture, and whether the
utterances were directed to the group or to a single child. In addition, we used Pearson
correlations for exploring the relationship between teachers’ uses of object and the different
types of gestures, as well as with the number of children that were present in each classroom.

Results
Across all 16 classrooms, teachers performed 6575 communicative bids. The most frequent
were verbal utterances (n = 3486, 53.0%), followed by verbal-gestural bids (n = 2911,
44.3%) and gestures (n = 178, 2.7%). This same distribution applies to their rate/min
proportion (Table 2). We found a significant effect of the type of communicative bid, F(2,14)
= 344.388, p < .001, ƞ2 = .980. Pairwise comparisons based on the Bonferroni procedure show
that there are no significant differences between verbal and verbal-gestural utterances, and
that the rate of gestural communicative bids is significantly lower than verbal-gestural (p <
.001) and verbal productions (p < .001). It is worth noting that most teachers’ gesture
production did not involve the use of objects, which was only observed in a small portion of
the behaviors (n = 756, 11.5%).
Table 2. Descriptive Statistics for Teachers’ Behaviors
Behavior Frequency Rate/min (M) Rate/min (SD)
Type of bid
Verbal 3486 12.20 2.95
Gestural 178 0.62 0.33
Verbal-Gestural 2911 10.62 1.98
Uses of object
With object 756 2.14 2.57
Without object 5819 9.88 5.14
Gestures
Pointing 637 2.27 0.69
Instrumental 340 1.73 1.67
Rhythmic 262 1.03 0.67
Conventional 1190 4.58 2.23
Symbolic 660 2.39 1.41
Orientation
Dyadic 1148 4.02 1.75
Polyadic 1941 0.63 0.18
Classroom layout
Circle 10 n/a n/a
Line 1 n/a n/a
L-shape 4 n/a n/a
Undefined 1 n/a n/a
*p < .05. **p < .01.
Teachers performed unequal numbers of each type of gesture. Of the 3089 total gestures
observed (which include both solely produced gestures and verbal-gestural bids), 1190 were
conventional gestures (38.5%), 660 symbolic gestures (21.4%), 637 pointing gestures
(20.6%), 340 instrumental gestures (11.0%) and 262 were rhythmic gestures (8.5%). We
found a significant effect of the type of gesture, F(4,12) = 14.959, p < .001, ƞ2 = .833.
Conventional gestures were more frequent than all other types of gestures, with significant
differences with pointing (p = .014) and rhythmic gestures (p < .001). We also found that the
differences between conventional and instrumental gestures were marginally significant (p =
.053), while there was no significance between conventional gestures and the production of
symbolic gestures (p = .065). Teachers’ use of rhythmic gestures was the least frequent,
showing significant differences with pointing (p < .001) and symbolic gestures (p = .033).
Interestingly, our data showed that, overall, most bids including gestures were directed to the
group (n = 1941, 62.8%), while only around a third of the total gesture production were
addressed to a single child (n = 1148, 37.2%). Moreover, the rate/min of dyadic and polyadic
gestures significantly differ, F(1,15) = 49.733, p < .001, ƞ2 =.768. Regarding the distribution
of each type of gesture, we found a similar trend in gestures addressed to the group and to
single children (Figure 1), as evidenced by the effect of the type of gestures with both dyadic,
F(4,12) = 18.268, p < .001, ƞ2 = .859, and polyadic instances, F(4,12) = 5.061, p = .013, ƞ2 =
.628. This probably results from the higher frequency observed in the production of
conventional gestures. However, certain types of gestures were more frequent in polyadic
than in dyadic interchanges, as observed for rhythmic, F(1,15) = 26.437, p < .001, ƞ2 = .638,
and symbolic gestures, F(1,15) = 33.284, p < .001, ƞ2 = .689.
Figure 1
Distribution of each type of gesture according to the orientation of the communicative bids
(dyadic vs. polyadic)

In order to analyze the relationship between classroom ratios, the type of gesture and the use
of objects while gesturing, we ran a series of Pearson bivariate correlations based on the
rate/min of each type of gesture and the number of children that were enrolled in each
classroom. We found negative and significant correlations between conventional gesture
rate/min and the number of children in the classroom, r(16) = -.547, p = .028. Also, similar
results arise from the relationship between gestures and the use of objects, r(16) = -.551, p =
.027.
Finally, in order to explore the relationship between the classroom layout and the type of
interaction strategies that teachers promote, we classified each participating classroom
according to the participants’ layout (circle, n = 10; lines, n = 1; L-shape, n = 4; undefined, n
= 1). Our results showed that the use of verbal-gestural communicative bids is similar across
all classrooms, except for the classroom with an undefined layout, where the teacher used
more verbal utterances (Figure 2). Furthermore, teachers posed unequal uses of gestures with
objects, which were very rare when children were sitting in a circle or an L-shape distribution.
The distribution of gestures directed to the group and to a single child also differed. Dyadic
gestures were more frequent in classrooms where children were arranged in lines or in an L-
shape. Note that the classrooms in which children were interacting in a circle or in an
undefined layout were the ones that showed the most similar pattern of those observed in the
full sample. However, distribution patterns of each type of gesture varied across classroom
layouts. While, as shown before, the full sample showed a greater proportion of conventional
gestures, we found that this was only observed in those classrooms where children were
sitting in a circle or L-shape. In turn, instrumental gestures were more frequent in lineal and
undefined layouts where, in fact, this comprised more than 60% of the teachers’ gesture
production.
[FIGURE 002]
Figure 2
Proportion of each type of gesture according to the classroom layout
We observed very low frequencies of some types of gestures in some classrooms, that might
be related to the spatial organization of the children. For instance, instrumental gestures were
the least frequent in L-shaped classrooms, and there was a small representation of pointing
gestures in classrooms that were organized in a line or according to an undefined layout (less
than 8%). The use of rhythmic gestures was typically low in all classrooms.

Discussion and Conclusions

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between materiality and teachers’
communicative strategies during group interactions in nursery schools with two- to three-
year-old children. Our findings show that half of the teachers’ communicative bids during
group interactions include the use of gestures, so combined verbal-gestural utterances are
more frequent than solely verbal utterances. This is interesting since previous research based
on dyadic interactions in home settings showed that only 20% of mothers’ communicative
bids include gestures (Casla et al., 2022; Iverson & Thelen, 1999). While adults’ combination
of gestures and verbal utterances has been typically seen as an attention getter tool or to direct
the child’s action (Iverson & Thelen, 1999; Schaffer et al., 1983; Tamis-LeMonda et al.,
2012), it seems that teachers use of these strategies during group interactions ensures an equal
distribution of their messages among all children. Additionally, how adults arrange the space
and materiality for one-to-one interactions considerably differs from those situations in which
a single adult must address her speech to a group of children. Therefore, the specific nature of
the relationship between materiality and group interactions in early childhood education
contexts needs to be explored.
Overall, we found dissimilar distributions in teacher gesture types, with conventional gestures
being more frequent than other types of gestures, such as pointing or instrumental gestures.
Previous studies examining mother-child interactions found that pointing gestures were, by
far, the most frequent gestures used by mothers (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2012). In a similar
way, mothers use pointing to regulate the child’s attention at 18 months and they are
associated with the regulation of the child’s action at 21 months of age (Schmidt, 1996).
Moreover, instrumental gestures are also highly frequent in children aged 24 and 36 months
(Rodrigo et al., 2006). Surprisingly, neither pointing nor instrumental gestures were the most
frequently observed in our data, which could partially explain why the proportion of gestures
with objects was significantly lower than those of gestures without objects. While
instrumental gestures usually involve transferring an object from the hands of one
communicative partner to another, circle time activities in our sample were not typically
object-centered. Instead, these activities are usually devoted to conversational group
interchanges or to the participation of all children and teachers in rhymes, routines and songs.
This may need more attention-getting strategies, such as conventional gestures, than action
regulation. In this sense, conducting longitudinal studies and ensuring a diverse sample in
terms of type of providers, SES background and children ages could shed light on whether the
use of objects is typically scarce in this type of group interactions, or whether it varies
according to different contexts and/or moments over the early years’ education (Hansen,
2018).
As normalized forms of conveying information, conventional gestures are more easily
addressed to the whole group. Indeed, the negative correlation between both the use of
conventional and instrumental gestures and the number of children suggests that gestures with
objects might be more frequent in smaller group interactions, as they allow for greater
individual participation (Degotardi, 2021). Also, the fact that the use of objects was very
infrequent in approximately 40% of the classrooms in our study does not necessarily mean
that educators in these classrooms neglect the importance of materiality. Perhaps they simply
did not use objects during circle time on that particular day, which could be due to a variety of
reasons (e.g., because the children’s conversation was fluent enough not to require extra
material support, or because they tend to use objects in different routines/moments). Follow-
up studies should investigate the reasons behind limited use of objects in certain classrooms
and if it could be associated with structural factors.
Moreover, we found dissimilar distributions in teacher gesture type used for addressing the
group or a single child during circle time interactions. Although, as mentioned before,
conventional gestures were the most frequent in both cases, it is interesting that symbolic and
rhythmic gestures, specific to songs and rhymes, were more frequently addressed to the group
than to individual children. The differences between dyadic and polyadic gestures highlight
the importance of considering the specific classroom layout during interactions, as they may
promote diverse communicative behaviors from children (Løkken & Moser, 2012). Thus, it
could be interesting to investigate if, while engaging many children in the interactions,
teachers are aligned with specific features of quality teacher-child interactions (Pianta, 2016),
such as encouraging children to brainstorm their own ideas, acknowledging their interventions
by repeating or rephrasing their responses (Casla et al., 2022), and providing positive and
encouraging feedback.
Even when the overall proportion of conventional gestures was very high, we observed how
the specific proportion of each type of gesture differed across the various classroom layouts.
Particularly, when children were sitting in lines or moving around the classroom (i.e., in an
undefined layout), teachers seem to promote more one-to-one exchanges than in other spatial
distributions. Considering that, in essence, these two layouts are quite different from each
other, we should delve deeper into the reasons that could underlie these similarities. First,
lineal layouts do not facilitate peer interaction as children cannot see most of their classmates,
and thus interaction and attention became teacher-centered. Conversely, in undefined layouts
children often stood up to get close to the teacher, showing her objects or trying to get her
attention (e.g., poking her shoulder), which resulted in increased child-teacher direct
interactions. Also, the use of instrumental gestures reached 60% in both lineal and undefined
layouts, thus reaching a similar proportion to that observed in dyadic interactions at home
(Rodrigo et al., 2006). While classroom group interactions are evidently not fully comparable
with mother-child dyadic interaction because, for instance, in the classroom children also
share interactions with their peers, our results indicate that circle time could be a rich
interactive environment if it also includes one-to-one interchanges of objects and speech.
Though our goal was not to make generalizable claims about the educators’ speech in the
early years, this study is the first step to depict the specific relationships between materiality
and multimodal communication beyond mother-child dyadic interaction. Further research
should increase the sample size and its diversity to yield more representative results. In
particular, while most classrooms conduct circle time activities and have a reasonable variety
of materials available, we need to know whether they are also accessible for children, i.e., if
they are given opportunities for exploration and free-choice (Bautista et al., 2020). Limited
accessibility to certain spaces and/or certain resources/materials without the supervision of the
educator could lead to substantial differences in the type of interaction that is promoted in the
classroom. Moreover, future studies should analyze children’s responses to the
communicative bids that teachers use (Cremin et al., 2017) and explore similarities and
differences across the various classroom layouts. This could potentially raise awareness for
early childhood practitioners about the importance of enacting more constructive forms of
interactions with a group of young children. Likewise, the scientific research on early
childhood education could be enriched by adopting a longitudinal perspective that, in turn,
would inform the analysis of adult mediation in early child development and its role in
fostering opportunities for children’s participation. This would allow for a comprehensive
analysis of the origin and changing nature of the communicative exchanges between
educators, toddlers and materiality, as well as the importance of spaces in promoting or
restricting certain classroom interactions. While circle time may include various types of
activities (e.g. presentations, book reading, storytelling, singing), its relationship with the
nature of communicative behaviors is still underexplored. As such, mapping the frequency
and proportion of time dedicated to each of those activities may contribute to better depicting
how circle time interactions unfold.
All in all, our results show that teachers’ communication with toddlers is highly multimodal
and could be shaped according to the interactive opportunities and limitations that the
classroom layout offers. Even when circle time is defined as a group activity that promotes
linguistic socialization (Poveda, 2003) and that fosters opportunities for conversational
interchanges and the production of linguistic utterances (Chaparro-Moreno et al., 2019), we
need to know better how they are mediated by the material and spatial organization. Despite
the limitations of this study, results suggest that there is a manifest distinction between dyadic
interactions at home and group (polyadic) interactions in the nursery school context, including
differences in the use of objects and space. These differences should be further explored to
understand the role of other factors (such as the school context, the children ages, or the
nature of the observed activities) in the opportunities and limitations that teachers may foster
through their interactive proposals. It is worth noting that most research on circle time
interactions has been conducted in kindergartens with children over three years of age.
Therefore, this study is significant because it also enriches the limited classroom-based
research literature with younger children by providing new data on classroom interactions
from a non-English-speaking country. Our study proposes exploring a topic with educational
and psychological interest for early infancy, given that group classroom activities have
demonstrated a wide potential to actively involve children and encourage their participation in
social interactions.
Ethics Statement
The present study was conducted according to guidelines laid down in the Declaration of
Helsinki. Written informed consent was obtained from children's main caregivers, teachers,
and the principal of each nursery school before data collection. All procedures involving
human subjects in this study were approved by the Research Ethics Committee at Universidad
Autónoma de Madrid (reference CEI-101-1896).

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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the staff and families from the participating nursery schools for their
invaluable cooperation with our studies.

Funding
This research was supported by project PID2019-108845GA-
I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and project PID2021-123907NB-I00, both co-funded by
the State Research Agency (Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain) and the European
Social Fund (ESF).

Competing Interests
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or
financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Biographical Statement
Ana Moreno-Núñez is Associate Professor in the Department of Developmental and
Educational Psychology, UAM. She leads the research group “Musical dynamics and early
triadic interactions” (MusicalETI), where she investigates early cognitive and communicative
development and, in particular, infants' engagement in interactions around materiality under
the mediation of adults.
Marta Casla is Professor in the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology,
UAM. She is interested in early linguistic development from a multimodal point of view, also
considering the role of adults and group interactions in educational contexts. She has
participated in different studies using both experimental and qualitative methods, and
naturalistic data.