Now the interesting thing is that nonetheless A. has developed his own set of gestures, most of which are his own creation, no adult suggested them to him. He now has a gesture for “let’s take a shower”, one for “Let’s go for a ride, by car of course”, “please Play some music, I would like to dance” (I’m not sure he really means to say Please too, I’m just putting it there), “I want to eat”, “I want to ride this bicycle/motorbike”, and few more.

I find this interesting, and I draw two conclusions:

• Do what you can, but if you can’t just leave it As I said, however much I believe in the relevance of gestures, creating and using new gestures just to communicate with my son felt very unnatural to me. And mind, I use gestures a lot in the Playgroups, but I find that in the relationship with my son eyes play a much bigger role than hands. Whatever. I clearly decided that if I had to adjust my communication style my priorities lied elsewhere (i.e. implementing OPOL consistently) and wouldn’t let this thing stress me out. Eventually he is creating the gestures he needs and somehow he will turn out OK nonetheless.

• 3. However, if you can… then do it If using gestures comes natural to you, and I believe it does to some parents, or you think it would be little effort. Then do it, by all means. I’m really convinced it helps. On top of observing my own child I also saw the relevance of gestures in my Playgroups. I have the feeling that gestures really help children and take a lot of stress away from them, if they can say it with their hands they know they are sending the message across, and then they add the word too, but without the urgency of communicating something, just for the fun of it. I repeat these are just my impressions, but it is certainly trues that research proves that gestures help learning, although for reasons that are much more complicated and subtle than this.

So, that’s what I have in mind. I want to have a pragmatic approach and start introducing only 5 gestures in my communication, to express 5 concepts: Home, Nice, Hungry, Catch me, Walk. And then I’ll see what happens, and I’ll let you know.

See here for Bilingualism at 23 months, I and Bilingualism at 23 months, III

BILINGUALISM STEP BY STEP

Here’s your homework for today. Think of something you’d like to change in your approach to bilingual upbringing. It could be anything: to stop mixing languages, to speak the minority language outside the house, to read books more frequently, anything. Pick one single thing, and set yourself a small target, specific and achievable. Don’t ask yourself major changes, just a small and easy one. Keeping the same examples it could be something like I’ll stop mixing languages at bath time (or in any other specific moment of the day), or I’ll speak the minority language when we are walking on our own on the street, or I’ll read a book every Tuesday eve, or anything like that. And of course, let us know how it goes, it could be easier than you think…

Related posts:

1. Gesticulating helps children to learn

Feb 19th 2009 | CHICAGO
From The Economist print edition

Gesticulating helps children to learn

HUMAN language is the subject of endless scientific investigation, but the gestures that accompany speech are a surprisingly neglected area. It is sometimes jokingly said that the way to render an Italian speechless is to tie his wrists together, but almost everyone moves their hands in meaningful ways when they talk. Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, however, studies gestures carefully—and not out of idle curiosity. Introspection suggests that gesturing not only helps people communicate but also helps them to think. She set out to test this, and specifically to find out whether gestures might be used as an aid to children’s learning. It turns out, as she told the AAAS, that they can.

The experiment she conducted involved balancing equations. Presented with an equation of the form 2 + 3 + 4 = x + 4, written on a blackboard, a child is asked to calculate the value of x. In the equations Dr Goldin-Meadow always made the last number on the left the same as the last on the right; so x was the sum of the first two numbers. Commonly, however, children who are learning arithmetic will add all three of the numbers on the left to arrive at the value of x.

In her previous work Dr Goldin-Meadow had noted that children often use spontaneous gestures when explaining how they solve mathematical puzzles so, to see if these hand-movements actually help a child to think, or are merely descriptive, she divided a group of children into two and asked them to balance equations. One group was asked to gesture while doing so. A second was asked not to. Both groups were then given a lesson in how to solve problems of this sort.

As Dr Goldin-Meadow suspected, the first group learnt more from the lesson than the second. By observing their gestures she refined the experiment. Often, a child would touch or point to the first two numbers on the left with the first two fingers of one hand. Dr Goldin-Meadow therefore taught this gesture explicitly to another group of children. Or, rather, she taught a third of them, taught another third to point to the second and third numbers this way, and told the remainder to use no gestures. When all were given the same lesson it was found those gesturing “correctly” learnt the most. But those gesturing “incorrectly” still outperformed the non-gesturers.

Gesturing, therefore, clearly does help thought. Indeed, it is so thought-provoking that even the wrong gestures have some value. Perhaps this helps to explain why the arithmetic-intensive profession of banking was invented in Italy.

Related posts:

1. Bilingualism at 23 months, II