Orchestrating multimodal corrective feedback in teaching Chinese as a foreign language classrooms: how teachers deploy gesture and speech to construct ideational meaning

Corrective feedback (CF) is central to second language learning, yet most research focuses on verbal exchanges or learner uptake, overlooking how teachers use multiple modes of speech, hand gestures, and head gestures to construct meaning during error correction. This study examines how teachers of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language strategically orchestrate these multimodal resources to make linguistic forms perceptually salient and support learners’ understanding. Drawing on twelve 45-minute classroom video recordings and using Systemic Functional-Multimodal Discourse Analysis, we identify 106 CF sequences across three classrooms. The analysis demonstrates that teachers consistently combine verbal recasts with gesture-based signals that mark tonal contours, highlight morphemic units, or clarify referential meaning. These co-instantiated resources construct structured interdependencies like paratactic, hypotactic, comparative, and additive relations that lead to semantic convergence. The findings reveal that multimodal orchestration provides a powerful explanatory lens for understanding how CF works and how it can be better designed in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.