This paper examines the oral responses of four retired content-subject teachers. It explores the teachers’ personal narratives as dialogic stories of how specific literacy sponsors and experiences helped challenge their ideologies, which in turn developed and transformed their teaching beliefs and activities. The teachers’ stories show evidence of the mediational role the combined voices of literacy sponsors and experiences played in their teaching experiences. A common theme found in all the experiences was the teaching affordances in their lives, where people and artifacts were used as mediational means in their activities, which drove their identity processes and narrative reflections. We argue that these mediationally driven experiences were the impetus for continuity and positive transformation in their pedagogical experiences and identity.

This paper investigates gesture’s relationship with teacherese and foreigner talk by two teachers working with second-grade English language learners (ELLs). Gesture and embodied positioning were analyzed for their role as meditational tools for meaning-making during reading time interaction. Foreigner talk and teacherese have similar characteristics in that a register shift is used to support comprehension for participants outside of a community’s accepted speech patterns (Ferguson, 1971, 1975; Cook, 1989). The foreigner talk and teacherese linguistic concepts exemplify input/output second language models of past decades but have been relatively unaddressed (Adams, 1998) regarding the understanding of the functions of gesture and embodiment in teaching young ELLs (Rosborough, 2010). Analysis of two teachers and ELLs provide insights into children’s early forms of conscious representation (Zlatev, 2006) in language, providing a materialization of meaning (McNeill, 2005). Additionally, gesture as mimesis concretizes the language concept for second language learners (McCafferty, 2008). In this paper, representational (iconic/metaphorics) and deictic/indexical gestures are identified for their affordances and constraints in meaning-making between the teachers and their students - complementing and extending the definition of foreigner talk and teacherese as a simplified input/output register shift. Using a Gibsonian (1979) ecological perspective coupled with embodiment as a central role in social practice of second language learning (van Lier, 2004), gesture-bodily positions and (inter)actions were found to play a central role in meaning-making. The data displays the interactive nature between the semiotic resources of the activity (i.e., speech, gesture/hands, reading time, book, floor-gathering) and their materialized bodily/speech-voiced acts coinciding with Thibault’s (2004) explanation of human meaning-making activity as a hybrid phenomenon that includes the cross-coupled relationship between semiotic affordances and physical-material bodily processes. This perspective also embraces Vygotsky’s (1978) view of dialectical development including the importance of psychological and materialized-physical tools in learning and development processes.