The Role of Gesture in Bilingual Education: Does Gesture Enhance Learning?

Abstract

Studies investigating the role gesture plays in communication claim gesture has a minimal role, while others claim that gesture carries a large communicative load. In these studies, however, the role of gesture has been assessed in a context where speech is understood and could easily carry the entire communicative burden. We examine the role of gesture when speech is inaccessible to the listener. We investigated a population of children who, by their circumstances, are exposed to a language that is not accessible to them: Spanish-speaking students in an English-speaking school. Fifty-one first grade English-speaking students and Spanish-speaking students were tested. Half of the English-speaking and half of Spanish-speaking students viewed a 'speech only' math instructional tape (i.e.instruction was not accompanied by gesture), while the other half of the English-speaking and Spanishspeaking students viewed a 'speech and gesture' instructional tape. We found that learning increased two-fold for all students when gesture accompanied speech instruction, increasing Spanish-speaking learning from 0% to 50%. We speculate that gesture improved learning for Spanish-speaking children because gestural representation is not tied to a particular language. Rather, gesture reflects concepts in the form of universal representations. Implications for the communicative function of gesture are discussed.