This study investigates moments when embodied actions and gestures become prominent interactional resources for teaching in the context of a second language (L2) writing classroom. The data consist of videorecorded interactions from a freshman English as a second language (ESL) writing classroom at a US university. The sequences of talk-in-interaction selected for multimodal analysis involve an instructor employing another student’s embodied actions as an interactional resource for explaining sentences that express requests. The data analysis reveals that when orienting to a student’s state of nonunderstanding, the teacher quoted another student’s (re) actions (see Keevallik, 2010) to explain the structure of requests. In other words, the teacher referred to and built on her student’s embodied actions in the same manner in which teachers usually refer to and build on students’ verbal comments. The analysis also demonstrates the emerging process of the teacher’s decision, in which she employed both verbal and embodied interactional resources such as cut-offs, silences and gaze shifts. Such use of interactional resources enabled the teacher to think about appropriate teaching actions in response to her students’ emerging needs. These findings offer an in-depth look at how an L2 teacher employed ‘complex multimodal Gestalts’(Mondada, 2014: 139), including embodied actions and gestures, to orient to moment-to-moment interactional needs to achieve courses of action and larger instructional goals.