Learning foreign languages can be quite difficult, especially because of all the complex parts that join together to give meaning to something. Previously, it has been seen that younger children can learn different languages more effortlessly than older children or adults. This can be explained through the critical period hypothesis (CPH), that demonstrates that children who learn languages before this period ends are able to acquire a language just as a native would. While learning languages there are many strategies that can be used to aid children. For example, teachers can provide opportunities for a child to speak the language being learned, or provide different visual resources like videos and songs, and using gestures while speaking.
In the study titled, “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism,” conducted by Zielinski and Wakefield (2021), the researchers analyzed the effects that the use of gestures have on English-Polish bilingual children’s narrative recall. In particular, the participants were more proficient in English than in Polish. The researchers presented the children with stories in both languages that also included either matching gestures or mismatching gestures. In this case, matching gestures refers to the idea that each of the gestures reinforces what is being said out loud, while mismatching gestures refers to a gesture that relates to what is said but is different. Overall, the use of matching gestures allowed the children to recall a lot more of the stories presented. Furthermore, the use of mismatching gestures negatively impacted the ways in which the children recalled the stories in Polish, which is their weaker language. This demonstrates that using gestures is an important part of learning languages, but it can become a disservice when they don’t help the children further understand the meaning of things.
Further research has been conducted into the use of gestures while teaching languages to young children in a Montessori learning setting. Overall, the Montessori learning model is characterized by allowing the children to have more independence through individualized work, sensory activities, creative projects, and hands on learning. Moreover, the teachers are able to supplement language learning by providing guidance through concrete materials and gestures. The study titled, ” Teachers’ Strategies in Teaching Spoken Language to Young Learners at Cita Harmoni Montessori School,” conducted by Febyawati and colleagues, uses qualitative data to analyze the different methods used by teachers in Montessori schools to aid children in understanding and practicing new languages. This particular study took place in Indonesia where the children were learning English during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, all the classes were conducted through online Zoom meetings which affected the attention spans of the children in question. The researchers were able to collect data by doing online classroom observations, interviewing the teachers, and creating focus group discussions with the teachers. Overall, it was demonstrated that the use of media, like pictures, songs and videos, that was provided by teachers effectively aided their students in learning to speak English more. In conjunction with this, the use of gestures by teachers also proved to be an effective method when teaching students languages. This is because the children were able to use the complementary gestures to better understand the meaning of the spoken English words. However, there were some instances where the teachers provided a translation of the English word to their native language. This was not as effective, especially because this did not allow the children to make their own connections and better understand the meanings. Teachers were also able to implement the use of creative writing so that children could understand English through writing and talking about what they wrote with others, which is a key characteristic of the Montessori teaching model.
In general, it can be concluded that using complementary gestures is an effective method in teaching new languages to children. Additionally, many of the Montessori methods of teaching spoken language have been shown to be effective. Therefore, it would be beneficial to employ these methods in all school settings to see improvements in learning.
References:
Febyawati, I., Halira Vonti, L., & Sutisna, E. (2021). Teachers’ Strategies in Teaching Spoken Language to Young Learners at Cita Harmoni Montessori School. Pedagogia Jurnal Ilmiah Pendidikan, 13(1), 6–11. https://doi.org/10.55215/pedagogia.v13i1.3663
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq
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