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

Oleh:

Church, Ruth Breckinridge ; Ayman-Nolley, Saba ; Mahootian, Shahrzad

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Full Text) vol. 7 no. 4 (2004), page 303 — 319.
Topik: gesture; bilingual; maths instruction
Fulltext: Vol. 7, No. 4, 2004, 303 — 319.pdf (317.48KB)

Isi artikel

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.

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali