Multimodal communication in career coaching sessions: lexical and gestural corpus study

Abstract

In the paper we aim to describe multimodal communication in career coaching sessions using recorded natural, face-to-face interactions and corpus techniques. We look on how the specific context of communication influences the lexical and gestural behaviour of speakers in the dialogues between a professional career coach and a participant. Main topic of the conversation was participant’s future career. Spoken corpus of career coaching sessions was compared with standard spoken Polish corpus, to reveal four main categories of keywords: cognition verbs, words describing uncertainty and words indicating an abstract referent. Also some types and functions of gestures in career coaching were analysed with the use of NEUROGES coding system.