Students’ meaning-making of nonverbal communication as representational scaffolding in UK chemistry education: Chinese students’ cross-cultural perspectives

Abstract

Chemistry learning places distinctive multimodal demands on students, requiring coordination across symbolic, submicroscopic, and macroscopic representations. While nonverbal communication has been shown to support representational reasoning in chemistry, it is often treated as a stable instructional resource, with limited attention to how its meaning is interpreted across cultural and educational contexts. This study examines how nonverbal communication functions as a discipline-specific semiotic resource in internationalised chemistry classrooms, drawing on the experiences of fifteen Chinese international students enrolled in UK chemistry modules. Guided by a sociocultural and interpretivist framework, in-depth semi-structured interviews were thematically analysed to explore how students notice, interpret, and respond to instructors’ nonverbal cues. Findings show that visual and auditory nonverbal cues serve distinct roles in supporting translation across representational levels and engagement with spatial, mechanistic, and procedural aspects of chemical knowledge. Students’ interpretations of these cues were strongly shaped by prior educational experiences and culturally grounded expectations, which in some cases led cues to be overlooked or misinterpreted as incidental rather than instructional. These findings highlight the importance of making multimodal and nonverbal resources explicit to support inclusive engagement with complex chemical representations in internationalised classrooms.