My name is Gale Stam. I am Professor of Psychology at National Louis University. I
am also an alumna of the McNeill Gesture Lab at the University of Chicago, was an invited
researcher at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL) in Aix-en-Provence, France
(February - June 2010), and retain close ties to both labs. My research interests include
language and culture, language and cognition, gesture, and first language and second
language acquisition. 

I am particularly interested in thinking for speaking and gesture (the development of
first language thinking for speaking and how thinking for speaking about motion changes
both linguistically and gesturally with second language acquisition), speech and gesture
interlanguage, the effect of gesture in oral proficiency interviews, the function of
gesture in lexical retrieval, and language teachers’ gestures. 

My current research projects are a study of gestures in teacher talk with Marion Tellier,
Aix-Marseille University and CNRS Laboratoire Parole et Langage, a longitudinal study of
L1 thinking for speaking, and a longitudinal study of changes in L2 thinking for
speaking.

Articles

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Review of Marianne Gullberg and Kees de Bot (eds): Gestures in Language Development., Applied Linguistics 2012; doi: 10.1093/applin/ams021 (2012)
 

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Thinking for speaking about motion: L1 and L2 speech and gesture, International Review of Applied Linguistics (2006)
 

Books

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Integrating Gestures: The interdisciplinary nature of gesture (with Mika Ishino) (2011)
 

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Gesture: Second language acquisition and classroom research. (with Steven G. McCafferty) (2008)
 

Contributions to Books

Gestes et recherche de mots en langue seconde, La corporalité du langage : Multimodalité, discours et écriture, Hommage à Claire Maury-Rouan (2012)
 

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Second Language Acquisition and Gesture, The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (2012)
 
Stratégies verbales et gestuelles dans l’explication lexical d’un verbe d’action. (with Marion Tellier), Spécificités et diversité des interactions didactiques (2012)
 

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Introduction (with Mika Ishino), Integrating Gestures: The interdisciplinary nature of gesture (2011)
 

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Découvrir le pouvoir de ses mains : La gestuelle des futurs enseignants de langue. (with Marion Tellier), Actes du Colloque « Spécificités et diversité des interactions didactiques : disciplines, finalités, contextes », INRP (2010)
 

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Selected Presentations

Changes in Thinking for Speaking Over Fourteen Years, Thinking, Doing, Learning: Usage-based Approaches to Second Language Learning Conference (2013)
 
Native or Non-native: The Interlocutor Matters in Interaction (with Marion Tellier and Brigitte Bigi), Laboratoire Lidilem - Université Stendhal-Grenoble III (2012)
 
Further Changes in Thinking for Speaking?, 19th Annual Social Cultural Theory and Second Language Learning Meeting (2012)
 
Same speech, same gestures? (with Marion Tellier and Brigitte Bigi), The Fifth Conference of the International Society of Gesture Studies (ISGS 5): The Communicative Body in Development (2012)
 

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Handling language: The gestures of future foreign language teachers (with Marion Tellier and Brigitte Bigi), First Wilga Rivers Colloquium on Foreign Language Pedagogy, American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference (2012)
 

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Poetry

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It was worse back then — or was it? (1987)
 

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THE WIND; FLIGHT (1982)