Towards the Understanding of Gestures and Vocalization Coordination in Teaching Context

Nonverbal behaviors such as facial expressions, eye contact, gestures, postures and their coordination with voice tone and prosody have strong impact on the process of communicative interactions. Successful employment of nonverbal behaviors plays an important role in interpersonal communication in the classroom between students and the teacher. Student teachers need to improve their teaching skills, from communication to management, and prior to entering the classroom. To support these aspects of teacher preparation, we developed a virtual classroom environment, TeachLivE for teacher training, reflection and assessment purposes. In this work we investigate the connections between gestures and vocalization characteristics of participants in a teaching context for two settings within the TeachLivE environment. We have developed an immediate feedback application that is presented to the participants in one of the study settings. It provides visual cues to the participant in front of the tracking sensor any time that she exhibits a closed stance. Identification of these type of connections between acoustic and gestural components of communication provides an added dimension that could assist us in using machine learning methodologies to extract multimodal features as teaching competency measures.