Exploring Gesture Use between Monolingual and Bilingual Cebuano Children

(Accepted for parallel paper presentation, 2014 International Conference on Applied

Linguistics and Language Education, October 2014, De La Salle University, Manila,
Philippines)

Cris Delatado Barabas

University of San Carlos, Cebu City, The Philippines
cdbarabas88@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to investigate the use of gestures among children in the
kindergarten level in the Philippines, particularly in the Cebuano context. Using
McNeils 99 Gesture Classification System, ) will compare the use of gestures
between five (5) children (5-6 years old) who are bilingual in both Cebuano and
English and are undergoing the regular English instruction in a private school with
those of another five (5) children who are monolingual and are undergoing a
mother tongue based language education (in this context Cebuano-Bisaya is the
language of instruction in all subject areas) in one of the public schools in Cebu City.
The primary aim is to determine whether bilingual children use more gestures
compared to monolingual children. I will extend my investigation into whether both
groups gesture more when they produce verbs or nouns. The children will watch
cartoon and will be asked to narrate what they saw. Through descriptive statistics
(ANOVA), I will also attempt to investigate if there is a significant difference in the
usage of a specific gesture (iconic) among the two groups. This paper will provide
some pedagogical implications in kindergarten instruction especially in the newly
experimented mother tongue based multilingual education (MTBMLE) in the
Philippines.

Bio-note:

Cris D. Barabas is a candidate for the MA in Applied Linguistics degree at the
University of San Carlos, Cebu City, The Philippines. He is also a lecturer in language,
speech, literature, and survey of visual arts courses in the same university. He
received his undergraduate degree double major in linguistics and literature from
USC. His MA thesis proposal explores the language use in promotional genre of
Philippine higher education institutions. His interests are corpus linguistics, critical
discourse analysis and psycholinguistics.