Kinesic communication in traditional and digital contexts: An exploratory study of ESP undergraduate students

Effective communication skills are crucial to succeed in many aspects of our personal and professional lives. Non-verbal communication plays a significant role in this success, affecting verbal communication and enhancing fluency. Gestures, facial expressions and eye-gaze function as non-verbal means to control and organize conversations (Jokinen, 2009). The present paper aims to address the existing gap in developing English for Specific Purposes (henceforth, ESP) students' non-verbal communication skills (Beltran-Plaques & Querol-Julián, 2018; Ruiz-Madrid, 2021) and addresses the analysis of kinesic physical aspects in face-to-face traditional and digital communication, be it synchronous (e.g., videoconferences) or asynchronous (e.g., recorded communication). Specifically, our objective is to analyze the kinesic communication skills of our ESP undergraduate students in traditional and digital settings using ELAN, a computer-aided multimodal discourse analysis tool. Our findings reveal that the participants' use of kinesic markers is inefficient in both contexts, showing significant difficulties in digital communication. Based on these results, some pedagogical implications are proposed to improve ESP students’ non-verbal communication skills in both settings.