Expressivity resources used by a university professor

Abstract

Introduction: The voice is the main tool of the teacher’s work and it is closely related to a goodprofessional performance. Several vocal and body resources are used in classroom by teachers in orderto arouse the interest of the student, to facilitate memorization and to enhance their learning. Purpose:To study the communication performance of a professor through an auditory perceptual and acousticanalysis of voice and speech, and through the analysis of gestures, to verify the association of theseresources as strategies of expressivity. Material and Method: We video-recorded some classes of aprofessor well evaluated by her students. After, we performed an auditory perceptual and acoustic analysisof the prosodic aspects of her voice and her speech, and a visual analysis of the video to classify thegestures enacted by her. Results: We noted the employment of six vocal expressive resources: frequency,intensity and speech rate variation, silent pause, extension of segments and exaggerated articulation.Regarding to gestures we observed the use of four gestural resources: a combined deictic and actiongesture, modal, depiction and deictic. Furthermore, the association of gestures with speech was observed.Conclusions: In speech, the expressivity manifested through the frequency (variation of melodic curve)and vocal intensity increase, variation of speech rate, exaggerated articulation; extension of segmentsand silent pauses. In the gestures, the expressivity manifested predominantly by combined deictic andaction gestures. In most cases, the gestures were associated with speech.