“Touching” with teaching language:

A philosophical inquiry into the speech of PE teachers

Abstract

　The purpose of the present study was to examine and demonstrate how the teaching language used in PE classes reaches students by analyzing the speech of the PE teacher and how it is perceived by students. A review of the literature on PE teacher feedback suggested that previous articles had taken a semiotic view of language. Due to the implicit effect of the semiotic lens, it appears that these articles failed to address the issue of speech as used by PE teachers.
　Merleau-Ponty’s language theory focuses on such speech. According to him, speech is not a representation of replacing results from inner thought with semiotic language, but rather a bodily gesture. It is an expression of individual bodily ability and has its own identity. If this view is accepted, it may be possible to capture the speech of PE teachers as a language tool. The arguments for this are discussed below.
　In order to understand PE teacher’s speech, it is necessary to focus on the bodily level of this phenomenon rather than the dictionary meaning of teaching language. At this level, speech used as a teaching language can be considered analogous to “touching” students. This expression, “touching,” should not be understood as a simply figurative one, but rather as a representation of how speech as a bodily gesture reaches students directly. From this viewpoint, a PE teacher’s speech can also be understood as a bodily phenomenon arising in the intercorporeal space, forming the foundation of intersubjectivity. Usually, PE teachers are not aware of this phenomenon, but it can be seen in their unconscious behavior. When a PE teacher calls for the students’ attention, for example when giving the instruction “look at my eyes,” its semiotic meaning is not important, because staring hard at the eyeballs, in a strict sense, has no practical meaning. Rather, by giving this instruction, the PE teacher generates a channel through which a student can receive the instruction on a bodily level. This bodily communication means that the PE teacher’s speech can resemble a bodily gesture analogous to “touching”, thus acting as a foundation for semiotic teaching instruction. In this way, the bodily ability of individual PE teachers is one of the reasons why the same teaching language may not be conveyed in a uniform way.