The Power of Intentional Teaching Gestures in an Australian Primary Bilingual Setting

Nick Boffa, Brunswick South Primary School

As an advocate of bilingual education and a teacher in a bilingual primary school, I have seen many of the benefits and challenges for students, families and teachers alike. Now, entering my fifth year of bilingual teaching, I am as passionate as I have ever been about the benefits for students. The difference today is that I have also seen the scope of the challenges for students as they adapt to learning through a language which is new to them – Italian in my case. Embracing these challenges can unlock some of the greatest student outcomes.

A senior literacy specialist once told me that “reading and writing floats on a sea of speaking and listening”. This resonates significantly for me in a bilingual setting. Any literacy educator is familiar with the “read-write” connection; students need exposure to both reading and writing every day (PETAA, 2025). However, speaking and listening are just as crucial, and this becomes even more apparent in a bilingual setting. Through my own experience, I have come to see the use of Intentional Teaching Gestures (ITG) as one of the most effective strategies available to a bilingual teacher in pursuit of generating student communicative use of the target language.

For clarity, when I refer to ITG, I am referring to sets of gestures that are explicitly taught and reinforced regularly, usually in addition to another scaffold, such as a visual aid. These gesture sets are universally applicable across any language (hence the versatility). For example, a set of gestures might teach questioning words including who, what, where, when, how and why.

The Benefits

The obvious benefit of using ITGs is the way it promotes use of a target language. Typically, I see this take place along a gradual release model that tracks students from their initial ability to interpret and use language with the teacher through to the use of scaffolded language with their peers. The aspirational zenith of bilingual education, in my opinion, is observing students using the language freely amongst themselves. I have observed this in early years classrooms in a way that I believe can be traced back to the explicit teaching of language, such as sentence starters, complete with gestures. These sentence starters, for example, “I see”, are accessible and allow the students to easily expand on their use as their grasp of the instructional language improves. Ideally the gestures are taught daily and allow students to use them as a scaffold for communication in the target language.

Melbourne-based academic Dr Naomi Wilks-Smith has been a guide for my own practice using teaching gestures as her studies support the idea that simultaneously teaching vocabulary with gestures can support the retrieval practice of students and increase the quantity of language production (Wilks-Smith, 2017, p.10).

The benefits of students using oral language translates seamlessly to improved writing outcomes in my classes. Often, students will use the same aforementioned sentence starters in targeted and free writing activities.

In my experience, teaching gestures are beneficial in two often-overlooked yet crucial areas of bilingual teaching and learning; first, they help students to try harder to speak the target language when it is much easier to say what they want to say in English. The students see the language as a viable vehicle for communicating beyond the parameters of any set task or activity being undertaken. This is the real objective of bilingual education, and is ultimately fulfilling and affirming for me as a bilingual teacher. Secondly, I feel that the ability to use gestures as unspoken prompts also greatly reduces the need to (verbally) repeat instructions. This has the potential to reduce teacher burnout – continually repeating instructions is very draining.

My experience tells me that ITG is an asset to bilingual education and my students have gained an enormous amount from the approach. 

References

PETAA (2025). The Reading Writing Connection. Retrieved 15 April 2025 from https://petaa.edu.au/w/w/English/The-Reading-Writing-Connection.aspx

Wilks-Smith, N. (2017), Intentional Teaching Gestures (ITG): A Tool for CLIL Teachers, CLIL Magazine, Spring 2017, pp.10-11

Nick Boffa is a passionate bilingual teacher based in Melbourne and he has experience in two bilingual settings in lower primary years. He currently teaches Year One/Two at Brunswick South Primary School.