Seeing the learner during a mediated tutoring session : influence of non-verbal cues on tutoring dialogue

International audience; This paper deals with the effect of non-verbal cues on a video-mediated tutoring situation. We will first state communication theoretical underpinnings and then we will focus on the role of kinesic cues and ostensive-inferential cues in communication and mediated activities. After that we will describe the coding scheme we used to analyze the tutoring dialogue and we will present two experimental studies that evaluate the effects of these non-verbal cues on the following measures: the tutor's proactive behaviour, the tutor-student's mutual understanding, the efficiency of the dialogue and the intrinsic tutoring speech acts. We will finally conclude with some considerations for the design of interfaces to support video mediated tutoring dialogue.