About Gale Stam, Ph.D.

I am Professor Emerita at National Louis University, where I was a full-faculty member from September 1986 through June 2020. I am also an alumna of the McNeill Lab – Center for Gesture and Speech Research 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 the lab.

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..