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The Role of Gesture in Bilingual
Education: Does Gesture Enhance
Learning?
Ruth Breckinridge Church, Saba Ayman-Nolley and Shahrzad Mahootian
Department of Psychology, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL,
USA
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 investi-
gated a population of children who, by their circumstances, are exposed to a langu-
age that is not accessible to them: Spanish-speaking students in an English-speaking
school. Fifty-one first grade English-speaking students and Spanish-speaking stu-
dents were tested. Half of the English-speaking and half of Spanish-speaking stu-
dents viewed a ‘speech only’ math instructional tape (i.e. instruction was not
accompanied by gesture), while the other half of the English-speaking and Spanish-
speaking 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 rep-
resentation 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.
Keywords: gesture, bilingual, maths instruction
Research demonstrates that social communication often includes nonverbal
behavior (Church et al., 1995; Ekman & Friesen, 1969; McNeill, 1992; Reilly &
Muzekari, 1986; Thompson & Massaro, 1994). The advent of such a finding
has led to debates on whether gesture carries a serious communicative load
(Kendon, 1994). The studies investigating what role gesture plays have found
a variety of possible roles ranging from minimal (e.g. Krauss et al., 1991) to
extensive (e.g. Kendon, 1994). In almost all studies of this nature, however,
the gesture studied has always accompanied a fully intact and understood
communicative modality, speech, using the native language of the listener.
Thus, the role of gesture is assessed in a context where it may not be necessary
to get the full communicative message because speech for the most part is
fully sufficient.
Nonverbal Communication
What role does gesture play when the language in the primary communicat-
ive modality, speech, is not accessible to the listener? Intuitively, we know
that gesture starts to take on more of a communicative burden when speech
1367-0050/04/04 0303-17 $20.00/0 2004 R. Breckinridge Church et al.
BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM Vol. 7, No. 4, 2004
303
304 Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
is ambiguous, hard to hear or absent. If you want to be convinced that gesture
has communicative power, just think of the game ‘charades’ where no speech
is allowed. The goal of this study was to evaluate the role gesture plays when
speech is very hard to understand. We investigated a population of children
in a bilingual programme who are, by their circumstances, exposed to a langu-
age that is barely accessible to them. That is, we examined the role of gesture
in instruction for those children who speak fluent Spanish and little or no
English, but who will be taught concepts in English. We asked whether ges-
ture assumes a heavy communicative role when it accompanies a language
that has not yet been acquired proficiently. Through an experimental study
we compared how well non-English-speaking children learned when instruc-
tion was provided only in English without accompanying gesture as well as
with English accompanied by gesture.
Gesture That Conveys Conceptual Information
Much of the work that has investigated the role of nonverbal behaviours
has looked at messages conveyed in affective displays (e.g. Ekman & Friesen,
1974; Mehrabian & Ferris, 1967). This study, however, looked at those gestures
that could be used to convey educational concepts. These types of gesture
convey conceptual information and are referred to as ‘representational ges-
ture’ (Alibali & Church, 1993; Boyatzis & Watson, 1993; Goldin-Meadow et al.,
1993; McNeill, 1992). We use the term ‘representational gesture’ to refer to
those gestures that use iconic imagery to express information about people,
objects and events (see McNeill, 1992, for a description of representational
gesture). Often, this imagery is closely tied to the accompanying speech. For
example, representational gesture can augment spoken information about
object attributes (e.g. making a large, circular gesture while saying, ‘It was a
big, round one’) or information about actions and events (e.g. holding the
hand as if to throw a football while saying, ‘Let’s throw the football’).
This type of representational gesture is different from conventional gestures
called ‘emblems’, whose form and meaning are explicitly shared by a parti-
cular culture (e.g. the ‘O.K.’ symbol depicted with a circle formed by the index
finger and thumb). Representational gestures are idiosyncratic because their
form and meaning are created by and derived from the speaker’s own unique
conceptions and are not part of an arbitrary language system (McNeill, 1992).
The idiosyncratic nature of representational gestures makes them particularly
useful for assessment of individual thinking patterns (Church, 1999). In
addition, their iconicity makes them easily understood across individuals
(Ekman & Friesen, 1969; McNeill, 1992). Recent research has demonstrated the
universality of representational gesture use (McNeill, 1992). McNeill and his
colleagues have demonstrated, for example, that across a variety of languages
(Georgian, Swahili and Asian): (1) representational gestures are used in the
same way to refer to acts described in speech; and (2) the same represen-
tational gestures are used when the same content is talked about despite the
fact that the content is being conveyed in different languages (McNeill, 1992).
McNeill asked speakers of different languages to retell a cartoon that they just
saw (a Tweety Bird cartoon). He found for example, that in the retelling of a
particular cartoon scene (Tweety drops a bowling ball down a pipe), speakers
305Gesture in Bilingual Education
of different languages used essentially the same representational gesture
(speakers held both hands at head level as if holding a bowling ball and then
dropped their hands downward representing Tweety dropping a bowling
ball) despite huge syntactical and lexical differences in language. Therefore,
we were very interested in examining them as vehicles for transmission of
information for speakers of different languages.
Representational gestures are produced in a variety of communicative con-
texts. For example, they are spontaneously produced during narratives
(McNeill, 1992), in social conversation (Boyatzis & Satyaprasad, 1994) and in
problem-solving explanations (e.g. Church, 1999; Church & Goldin-Meadow,
1986; Perry et al., 1992). Despite the fact that gestures are frequently produced
spontaneously with speech, gestures have not been treated as an essential part
of language. In addition, because gesturing is for the most part
unconscious, it may also be true that listeners detect and interpret gestures
unconsciously. We describe what has been found with respect to gesture pro-
cessing in the communicative context.
What Roles Do Gestures Play in Speech Communication?
Processing gesture when it is redundant with speech
Research on gesture processing during communication has primarily exam-
ined the role gesture plays in the processing of speech. In these studies,
researchers examined how gesture that is redundant with speech might
improve recall of speech. Thompson and her colleagues (Thompson et al.,
1998) showed that both children and adults were better at picking up infor-
mation from speech when it was accompanied by gesture. In particular they
examined how pointing gestures were used when identifying words. Children
and adults, for example, were better able to identify the word ‘ball’ when it
was spoken in conjunction with pointing to a ball than when it occurred with-
out pointing. Thus, it could be argued that even when gesture is not carrying
a huge communicative burden it is helpful during communication.
It could be argued that gesture improves speech recall simply because it
calls attention to speech, rather than because it provides conceptual infor-
mation that cues memory for speech. Woodall and Folger (1985) compared the
effects of representational gestures (that carried semantic information) with
‘emphasising’ gestures (gestures that rhythmically beat during speech). They
found that representational gestures improved memory for speech signifi-
cantly more than the ‘emphasising’ gestures. This suggests that gesture’s role
as a facilitator for remembering speech is based on its content or meaning and
not simply its attention-getting properties.
Nevertheless, it has been argued that gesture does not in fact service the
listener, but services the speaker by facilitating word search for the
speaker/gesturer (Krauss, 1998). That is, gesture has more of an internal func-
tion for the producer than an external function for the listener. We argue here
that gesture may have both an internal and external function. The external
function, however, is hard to determine because of the authority of speech.
The research-examining gesture that carries information that is redundant to
speech reinforces the belief that gesture carries little communicative burden.
306 Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
There have been a number of studies demonstrating that gesture often conveys
additional information than that conveyed in speech. This situation is a better
test for determining how important gesture is in communication. The next
section describes studies that have looked at gesture’s role when gesture pro-
vides additional information not found in speech. If the communicative bur-
den is shared by gesture, does its role in communication increase?
Processing gesture when it provides information not found in speech
Two sets of studies have looked at gesture that provides additional infor-
mation not found in accompanying speech. One set of studies examined how
adults and children process gesture that ‘mismatched’ speech and the other
examined gesture that disambiguated speech. In the first set of studies, adults’
ability to process gesture produced by children during teaching interactions
was examined (Goldin-Meadow et al., 1992; Kelly & Church, 1997, 1998). This
research was based on the finding that children frequently produce gestures
while attempting to explain their understanding of a concept in question (e.g.
mathematical concepts, scientific concepts and social concepts). Many chil-
dren, when asked to explain their understanding of a concept, often produce
gestures that mismatch their speech. For example, in a Piagetian conservation
task, a child may say that water poured from a tall glass into a short dish has
changed in amount, explaining that the glass is taller than the dish. At the
same time this child’s gestures may have indicated a different (mismatching)
conceptualisation of the problem, indicating the glass is skinny and the dish
is fat.
A number of studies asked whether adults, when attempting to teach the
child, processed and used this mismatching gesture to assess what the child
knows both consciously and unconsciously. If gesture were not important,
one would presume that children who produced mismatching gesture would
not be treated any differently than children who produced matching or no
gesture. In fact, research demonstrates that adults: (1) detect information con-
veyed in mismatching gesture; and (2) use this mismatching information to
make assessments of children’s knowledge and ability (Church et al., 2000;
Goldin-Meadow et al., 1992; Kelly & Church, 1998).
Moreover, studies have also examined whether children who observe
speech accompanied by mismatching gesture detect and process the gesture
(Church et al., 2000; Kelly & Church, 1997, 1998). These studies revealed that
children also detect and process information conveyed by gesture, although
at lower levels than speech.
A second set of studies has examined gesture that provides additional infor-
mation that disambiguates speech (Barr et al., 1999; Thompson & Massaro,
1994). For example, if the spoken word for ‘ball’ was obscured (consonants
are slurred so it was not clear whether the word ‘ball’ or ‘doll’ was being
said), a point to the object, ball, greatly improved the identification of the
word ‘ball’ (Thompson & Massaro, 1994). When gestural information is pro-
vided that disambiguates conceptual reference in speech, gesture is detected
and used for interpretation. Thus, in this context gesture is heavily relied upon
in communication.
In sum, the research just described examined the effect of communication
307Gesture in Bilingual Education
in which gesture shared some of the communicative burden. Although one
could hypothesise that ‘mismatching’ or disambiguating gesture could be
ignored given the status of speech, the fact of the matter was that both children
and adults identified and interpreted information uniquely provided in ges-
ture, although still at significantly lower levels than speech (Church et al.,
2000).
What role does gesture play in teaching?
In an effort to extend the examination of gesture’s role in communication,
our previous research has looked at gesture’s impact on teaching. We used
videotaped instruction of a mathematical concept that varied in whether
representational gesture accompanied speech instruction or not. Specifi-
cally, we showed different groups of children the following instructional
tapes: (1) Speech instruction with no accompanying gesture; (2) speech
instruction accompanied by ‘emphasising’ gesture (gesture with no
representational or conceptual content); and (3) speech instruction with
redundant gesture (gesture conveyed the same instructional information as
speech). We found that videotaped instruction had a greater impact on
learning when redundant gesture accompanied speech instruction than
when emphasising, non-redundant gesture or no gesture accompanied
speech (Church et al., 1999, 2001b). Children who watched videotapes in
which the teacher conveyed instruction through a combination of speech
and redundant gesture were significantly more likely to learn the
mathematical concept being taught and retain that new knowledge long
after instruction had taken place. Therefore, gesture had a powerful impact
on the learning of a concept even for children who fully understood the
language expressed in speech.
Although the literature suggests that gesture can be detected and processed
along with speech, its power in communication cannot be fully assessed
because it always plays second fiddle to speech. A true measure of its impact
in communication can only be fully understood if we assess its communicative
effect in the absence of speech. Because gesture rarely occurs without speech
in natural communication, this is a difficult question to answer. This study,
however, attempted to answer this question by investigating the role gesture
plays in a naturally occurring situation where speech is completely obscured
and therefore has significantly less of a communicative role. We ask how effec-
tive gesture communication is when the speech is not accessible to the listener.
To evaluate the role gesture plays when speech is not accessible, we exposed
children who could not fully understand English (Spanish-speaking children
in American schools who had not yet learned English proficiently) to instruc-
tion that was in English and to instruction that was in English but with
accompanying representational gesture conveying the same information. That
is, when children who cannot speak English are attempting to learn a concept
that is taught in English, we ask, ‘How important is gesture that accompanies
speech for helping children grasp that concept?’ We hypothesised that in the
absence of speech, gesture plays a significant role in communication. Specifi-
cally, in the absence of speech, gestures can be used to teach educational con-
cepts.
308 Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Method
Participants
Fifty-one first grade students (29 females and 22 males), 26 from a main-
stream English speaking classroom, and 25 from a bilingual programme class-
room where the students speak only Spanish were tested. The students were
from a Chicago Public Elementary school, on the northwest side of Chicago.
The mean age of the participants was 7 years.
Description of the Spanish-speaking participants in the bilingual
programme
The Spanish-speaking subjects attended a Chicago Magnet bilingual school.
Placement into a bilingual classroom proceeds as follows. Upon entering the
school, all students from non-English-speaking households are given a series
of placement tests, starting with a listening comprehension test in English.
Any child receiving a score below 52 is considered as having little or no
English. Students achieving a score of 52 or higher are given additional place-
ment tests to measure their reading and writing skills. The students participat-
ing in this research had all received scores of less than 52 on this test. Their
proficiency was determined as Level 1 out of four levels, with Level 4 being
the highest proficiency level. Level 1 indicates that student may have little or
no capacity to speak or comprehend English. At the beginning of the school
year, Level 1 students were placed in the bilingual programme where they
received 30 minutes of ESL (English as a second language) instruction per
day. The rest of their instruction was provided in Spanish. Near the end of
the school year, students were given a proficiency test to evaluate the amount
of progress they had made in English. Of the 25 participants in our study,
four had made enough progress by the end of the school year to move to
Level 2.
Materials
The testing video materials used to conduct the study included a television,
VCR, two experimental videos, a testing video, and answer sheets.
The testing video
A testing video was created to pre-test and post-test the children in the
concept of conservation. The students used an answer sheet to answer ques-
tions that were posed in the video. In the testing video, three conservation
tasks were performed, testing conservation of water, length, and number. The
testing video contained the traditional conservation task with questions. Two
females in the video spoke, first in English and then in Spanish. This was
done to make sure that the Spanish-speaking students could perform the con-
servation tasks at their optimal levels.
For example, in the water task, two glasses with the same amount of water
were shown, and one speaker then asked, ‘Do these glasses have the same
amount of water?’ Then the other speaker posed the same question in Spanish.
On answer sheets provided, the English-speaking students had to circle S for
‘same’ or D for ‘different’ while the Spanish-speaking students had to circle
309Gesture in Bilingual Education
the Spanish equivalent, M for ‘mismo’ (‘same’) or D for ‘diferente’ (‘different’).
Next, the water from one glass was poured into a short flat dish and the
English speaker asked, ‘Does this dish have the same or a different amount
of water as the water in this glass?’ The Spanish speaker then posed the same
question in Spanish. The English-speaking students had to circle S or D on
their answer sheet while the Spanish-speaking students circled M or D on
their answer sheets. The water from the dish was then poured back into the
glass and the English speaker asked, ‘Does this glass of water have the same
amount or a different amount of water as this glass’ (indicating the other
glass). The Spanish speaker then posed the same question in Spanish. The
students were then asked to circle S or D (for the English speakers) or M or
D (for the Spanish speakers) on their answer sheets. The same procedure was
used for testing conservation of length and number. In the length task, two
rulers were used. First the rulers were placed parallel to each other with the
ends aligned. In the transformation phase, one ruler was placed vertically to
the other ruler. In the number task, 12 quarters were used. The coins were
first placed in two horizontal rows with the ends aligned. In the transform-
ation phase, one row was spread out slightly with equal amounts of spaces
in between them so the ends were no longer aligned with the untransfor-
med row.
The experimental videos
Two instructional videos were created for the students to watch. The
instructional videos explained why the transformed water and the transfor-
med rows of coins do not change in amount. One video provided this expla-
nation in English with minimal accompanying gesture (only indexical points
were used to indicate the task objects in question). For example, the speaker
said, ‘I know that the water in this dish has the same amount of water as this
glass. I know this because I did not add any water to the dish and I did not
take any water away. I also know this because even though the glass is taller
than the dish, the glass is also thinner than the dish’. Explanations invoking
the same two rationales were provided for the rows of coins.
The second instructional video contained the identical verbal instruction but
with accompanying representational gestures. These gestures were modelled
after those gestures typically used by children who explain their understand-
ing of conservation (see Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986). For example, while
the instructor said, ‘I know this because I did not add any water to the dish
and I did not take any water away’, she gestured a motion of pouring water
into a dish and scooping water out of the dish. While the instructor said, ‘I
also know this because even though the glass is taller than the dish, the glass
is also thinner than the dish’, she gestured ‘tall’ glass and ‘short’ dish and
then ‘thin’ glass and ‘wide’ dish (see Appendix for the detailed description
of gestural movements). The videos were done in English to emulate a typical
English-speaking class.
Procedure
A television and VCR were placed into each classroom. One classroom con-
tained English-speaking students and one classroom contained Spanish-speaking
students. Each class watched the testing video and completed the pre-test
310 Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
answer sheets to assess the students’ understanding of the conservation con-
cept. After the pre-test procedure, the two classrooms were split up and
recombined so that each classroom consisted of half English-speaking and half
Spanish-speaking students. One class was exposed to the instructional video
without gestures while the other class was exposed to the instructional video
with gestures. After they watched the instructional videos, the children were
given the video presented post-test that was identical to the pre-test. Learning
was determined by assessing improvement in conservation understanding
from the pre-test to the post-test. We coded a child as having improved if the
post-test contained additional ‘S’ or ‘M’ responses that had not been observed
in the pre-test.
Results
General description of population
We compared children’s ages across four groups: (1) English-speaking stu-
dents exposed to video instruction with gesture; (2) English-speaking students
exposed to video instruction without gesture; (3) Spanish-speaking students
exposed to video instruction with gesture; and (4) Spanish-speaking students
exposed to video instruction without gesture. Children were on average 7 years
old. There was no significant difference found in age across the four groups
(f (3,47) =0.087, n.s., Table 1). The distribution of boys and girls was also not
significantly different across these four groups (
2
(3) =0.20, n.s., Table 1). No
child demonstrated conservation understanding in the pre-test.
Table 1 Description of population
Average age SD (in months) Proportion
males (%)
Spanish-speaking exposed 7.22 6.43 40%
to gesture
Spanish-speaking exposed 7.21 3.37 40%
to no gesture
English-speaking exposed 7.23 2.64 46%
to gesture
English-speaking exposed 7.15 6.26 47%
to no gesture
Effects of instruction
First, we asked whether the instructional video conditions had a differential
effect on learning. In order to answer this question, the number of children
who improved after exposure to the instruction with gesture was compared
to the number of children who improved after exposure to instruction without
gesture. We found that children exposed to the instructional video with ges-
ture did significantly better than the children who were exposed to the instruc-
tional video without gesture. Seventy-one percent of the 21 children exposed
to the gesture instruction improved from pre-test to post-test, while 37% of
the 30 children exposed to the no gesture video instruction improved (
2
(1)
311Gesture in Bilingual Education
Figure 1 The effects of the instruction on learning
=5.97, p< 0.02, Figure 1). Thus, when English instruction was accompanied
by gesture all children benefited more than when instruction was not
accompanied by gesture.
Effects of the children’s language proficiency
Next, we asked whether the language proficiency of the children had an
effect on learning. That is, we asked whether English-speaking students and
Spanish-speaking students benefit differently from instruction regardless of
whether gesture was present or not. In order to answer this question we coun-
ted the number of children in the English-speaking group and the number of
children in the Spanish-speaking group who improved from pre-test to post-
test. We found that significantly more of the English-speaking students than
the Spanish-speaking students improved. Sixty-nine percent of the 26 English-
speaking students improved compared to 32% of the 25 Spanish-speaking stu-
dents (
2
(1) =7.07, p< 0.001, Figure 2). Thus, the English-speaking students
did benefit more than the Spanish-speaking students.
Figure 2 The effects of language curriculum on learning
312 Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Effects of instruction and language proficiency
Finally, we asked whether there was an interaction effect between instruc-
tion and language proficiency on learning. That is, we asked whether English-
speaking students and Spanish-speaking students reacted differently to
instruction with or without gesture. In order to answer this question, we coun-
ted the number of children who improved from the pre- to the post-test in
the following four groups: (1) Spanish-speaking children exposed to the
instruction with gesture; (2) Spanish-speaking children exposed to instruction
without gesture; (3) English-speaking children exposed to instruction with
gesture; and (4) English-speaking children exposed to instruction without ges-
ture. We found an interaction between language proficiency and the type of
instruction (
2
(3) =12.816, p< 0.001, Figure 3). English-speaking students
benefited significantly more than the Spanish-speaking students from instruc-
tion presented with gesture, but both groups still benefited more from instruc-
tion with gesture than without. Ninety-one percent of the English-speaking
students and 50% of the Spanish-speaking students exposed to instruction
with gesture improved in their understanding of the conservation concept. In
contrast, 53% of the English-speaking students and 20% of the Spanish-speak-
ing students exposed to instruction without gesture improved.
Figure 3 The effects of instruction and language curriculum on learning
Discussion
Is gesture important for communication?
We asked what communicative value gesture has when the accompanying
speech modality is impoverished. To answer this, we examined how
important gesture was for children who do not speak English. English- and
Spanish-speaking children were exposed to video instruction accompanied by
concrete representational gesture that reflected the same conceptual infor-
mation as speech. The effect of this instruction on their learning was compared
to the same video instruction without accompanying gesture. The communi-
313Gesture in Bilingual Education
cative value of gesture was measured by the amount of learning that took
place after the video instruction. If gesture had no communicative value, then
there would have been no difference in learning as a function of whether the
instruction contained a gestural component. We found, in fact, that instruction
with gesture facilitated learning for all the children. Instruction with gesture
increased learning nearly two-fold compared to instruction without gesture
for both the Spanish- and English-speaking children. We ask then, how or
why gesture improved the communication of the math lesson. What is gesture
doing to help get this message across?
What purpose does gesture serve?
Gesture is a behaviour that is stimulated by the need to communicate.
Therefore, it has been assumed that gesture serves an external function: to
help convey a message to a listener (e.g. Kendon, 1994). On the other hand,
a substantial amount of research shows that gesture serves an internal func-
tion: to help the speaker process thoughts and put them into communicative
form (Church, 1999; Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986; Krauss, 1998; McNeill,
1992). Krauss (1998) argues convincingly that gesture does little to help convey
a message to a listener, and thus only serves an internal function for the pro-
ducer of the gesture. This explains why people continue to gesture when a
listener is not in view (e.g. when we talk on the telephone).
Nonetheless, studies have demonstrated that gesture is helpful for convey-
ing a message (Barr et al., 1999; Church et al., 2000; Kelly & Church, 1997, 1998).
Gestures are detected and interpreted independently from speech (e.g. Kelly &
Church, 1998) and improve the communication of the spoken message
(Church et al., 2000). In all these cases, gesture is processed at significantly
lower levels than speech. We argue that this is because speech is still sufficient
to convey the message. Therefore, gesture is not quite as necessary. When
speech is inaccessible, as it was in this study for the Spanish-speaking children,
gesture becomes essential for getting a message across. Therefore, gesture’s
external communicative function cannot be ruled out. We argue that gesture
serves both an internal and external function through the same represen-
tational mechanism that we will now describe.
How does gesture help communication and internal processes?
The authors here do not want to argue that gesture serves exclusively either
an internal or an external function. Rather, it serves both internal and external
functions using the same mechanism. Specifically, we suggest that gesture
serves a communicative function using a similar process as Krauss’ (1998)
theorised lexical access function. Here is how it works. The speaker is
attempting to access a word to say, for example, ‘goatee’ and he starts to
stroke his own chin. This facilitates lexical access of the word ‘goatee’ and he
says ‘The man had a goatee’. The listener processes the chin stroke that also
starts a lexical search for the word ‘goatee’. Thus, the message is more likely
to be processed with the gesture than without. The lexical search process
works not only for the speaker but the listener as well. We argue that the
lexical search mechanism that operates in the listener who views gesture is
what was behind the effect of instruction with gesture for both the Spanish-
314 Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
and English-speaking children. For the Spanish-speaking children, the gesture
in instruction might have facilitated access to the Spanish lexicon and there-
fore, provided a bootstrap for learning the new concept that would have other-
wise been completely inaccessible.
Decoding speech and gesture as an integrated system
Through a large corpus of literature, it has now been established that com-
munication includes not only speech but a host of other nonverbal mediums
(cf. Goldin-Meadow & Feldman, 1977). McNeill (1992) has made theoretical
claims that speech and gesture work as an integrated system not only for the
producer but for the listener as well. A number of researchers have provided
experimental evidence for the theory that listeners use both speech and ges-
ture to decode communication (Alibali et al., 1997; Boyatzis & Satyaprasad,
1994; Cassell & McNeill, 1990; McNeill, 1992; Thompson et al., 1998). The study
presented here offers further support for this theory. What this study demon-
strated was that when half of the system is absent (as it was for the Spanish-
speaking children), speech and gesture instruction could only be half as effec-
tive. The result was that at least 50% of the children learned when provided
with both speech and gesture modalities compared to 20% when Spanish-
speaking children only received one modality. In contrast, virtually all of the
English-speaking children learned when given instruction in both speech and
gesture. When they received only half of the communicative system (speech
only), only half of the English-speaking children learned. Thus, without any
formal training in gesture decoding, these children naturally turned to the
gesture modality as an integrated part of the communication process. This
further argues that using speech and gesture (and any other communicative
media) is part of the natural communication process. It is then interesting to us
why gesture has not been systematically incorporated more in the educational
process, and moreover, in the bilingual educational process.
Application to bilingual education
A number of studies have demonstrated that gesture can help with langu-
age acquisition. Acredolo and Goodwyn (1988) demonstrated that preverbal
children who were taught a gesture system before they could talk proficiently
talked much sooner and had greater vocabulary than those who were not
taught the system. Moreover, those who used their gesture system during
communication showed much less frustration during the communicative pro-
cess than those who didn’t have a gesture system. We argue that the same
teaching principle could be applied to students who are learning a second
language. If they could be taught a system of gesture to use while they are
learning English, then, like Acredolo’s toddlers, they might learn English
sooner and with less frustration.
In the end, this research took a very simple experimental idea and applied
it to education. Previous research showed that gesture is spontaneously pro-
duced during communication and that gesture reflects the same underlying
concepts that drive speech (Church, 1999; Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986;
McNeill, 1992). Moreover, listeners of communication detect and process ges-
tured information and use it to comprehend communication (Alibali et al.,
315Gesture in Bilingual Education
1997; Church et al., 2000; Kelly & Church, 1997, 1998; Perry et al., 1995). We
asked how this discovery could be useful in application – in particular to
bilingual education. That is, could gesture help a spoken message that was
blocked, in this case, by a language barrier? The results provided answers to
both theoretical and applied questions.
First, we note that this research was not done in a laboratory setting with
an atypical population. Rather, the research was done in a school classroom
setting using children in a bilingual programme that was very typical of
bilingual programmes in the United States. The video stimuli used was highly
controlled but presented in a classroom with all the natural factors of a class-
room being present for both the non-English and English-speaking children.
It is for these reasons, that the results of our study could have general appli-
cation. There is no reason to think that these results could not have been found
in another school or another bilingual programme.
Cummins (1984) has suggested that communicative demands for the non-
native-speaker may vary as a function of communication setting. In a ‘context-
embedded’ setting, such as informal conversations, language proficiency
appears high because the non-native speaker can make use of paralinguistic
and situational cues. In contrast, in a ‘context-reduced’ setting, like a class-
room setting, the language proficiency appears low because communication
relies almost entirely on linguistic (vs. paralinguistic) cues. The linguistic
demands in a classroom setting make academic development even more chal-
lenging. One implication of our results is that gesture accompanying verbal
instruction makes a ‘context-reduced’ setting operate more like a ‘context-
embedded’ setting. By reducing the formal linguistic demands of a classroom
setting, bilingual students may be better able to concentrate on conceptual
learning. Moreover, introducing context-embedded cues, like gesture into
instruction, may provide a scaffold for developing ‘context-reduced’ language
proficiency. In addition, because the English-speaking students also benefited
from instruction with gesture, our results suggest that this strategy could be
implemented in classrooms where bilingual students are first mainstreamed.
Our results suggest that gesture should be carefully considered as an
additional teaching strategy in a bilingual classroom. These results, however,
can be generalised to education in general. All of our participants benefited
more from instruction with gesture than without gesture. Moreover, the
impact of gesture on learning has been found in previous studies (Church
et al., 2001a) with respect to the instruction of an abstract mathematical con-
cept.
Gesture is a modality that serves an external communicative purpose
through its conceptual link with speech. Oksaar (1989) discusses how critical
the non-verbal and extra-verbal components are to communication. In parti-
cular, understanding the appropriate nonverbal accompaniments to speech is
important for correct interpretation of speech. Oksaar illustrates the impor-
tance of nonverbal behaviour in the interpretation of the German word ‘Dan-
ke’ which can be interpreted as ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on whether it is said
with a nod of the head. If ‘danke’ is said with a nod it means yes. Oksaar
further elaborates on many other extra-linguistic components of communi-
cation including pragmatically determined behaviours that can be interpreted
316 Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
as inappropriate or rude in some cultures (such as asking a personal question
like ‘How old are you?’ which is impolite for Europeans and Americans) while
non-offensive in other cultures (personal questions are acceptable for Asians).
Oksaar’s argument reflects the growing and important need to expand the
model of second language learning to include not only the mastery of the
semantics and syntax of language but the extralinguistic components as well.
This study examined only a small aspect of extralinguistic material – ges-
ture. The gesture we examined, as pointed out in the introduction, is of a
specific type – idiosyncratic representational gesture that is tied more closely
to the unique conceptions of the speaker than to the pragmatic rules of the
culture (although the cultural interpretation of representational gesture use
surely needs more systematic examination). We argue that the represen-
tational gesture that we examined was a communicative device that is not
tied to the structure or pragmatics of a particular language. Rather, the gesture
reflects conceptual knowledge in a nonlinguistic form that may be universally
understood (see McNeill, 1992 for a discussion of cross-cultural use of rep-
resentational gesture). Certainly the gestures used in our study benefited
learning for both English and non-English speakers. We therefore, conclude
that the gestures were also understood both by English and non-English
speakers.
Because of the nature of representational gestures used in this study, the
authors suggest that representational gesture may be a very useful sup-
plement to speech when teaching those who are first learning a language. In
this study we used gesture to teach a concrete quantity concept. The pro-
duction of representational gesture, however, has been found in a variety of
other concepts including mathematical concepts (Alibali et al., 1997; McNeill,
1992; Perry et al., 1992); moral reasoning (Church et al., 1995); seasonal change
(Crowder & Newman, 1993); control of variables (Stone et al., 1991), physics
(Perry & Elder, 1996); and rate of change (Alibali et al., 1995, 1999). In addition,
teachers and students frequently produce gestures during classroom interac-
tions (Crowder & Newman, 1993; Goldin-Meadow et al., 1999; Neill, 1991;
Zukow-Goldring et al., 1994). In essence, whenever individuals explain their
understanding of an academic topic, gestures are inevitably produced. To state
a specific case, McNeill (1992) described a conversation held by two University
maths professors where one professor explains the concept of a ‘direct limit’
in speech while simultaneously propelling his hand in a straight line with an
emphatic endpoint. Despite the frequency of gesture production in
classrooms, very little research has examined gesture’s role in the learning
process. Given this, it is conceivable that gesture could be incorporated in
the teaching of those concepts that are tied to nonlinguistic representations.
Assuming that the nonlinguistic representations may share imagery that
applies across cultures, we may be able to take the leap from the laboratory
to the field.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to R. Breckinridge Church, Depart-
ment of Psychology, Northeastern Illinois University, 5500 N. St. Louis
Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625, USA (rbchurch@neiu.edu).
317Gesture in Bilingual Education
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319Gesture in Bilingual Education
Appendix
Examples of speech and gesture training
Rationale 1: Identity
Speech
‘I know this because I did not add any water to the dish and I did not take
any water away.’
Gesture
The right and left hands arc toward the inside of the dish indicating POUR
IN. Then the right and left hands make a scooping motion from inside the
dish to the outside of the dish indicating POUR OUT.
Rationale 2: Compensation
Speech
‘I also know this because even though the glass is taller than the dish, the
glass is also thinner than the dish’.
Gesture
First, the right hand is flat with the palm face down and placed over the tall
glass indicating TALL. The flat hand is then placed over the short dish indicat-
ing SHORT. The right hand then forms a ‘C’ shape and is placed next to the
thin glass indicating THIN. The ‘C’ shaped hand widens and is placed next
to the wide dish indicating WIDE.
