Brett Chonko wrote something about gesturing here a few years ago that is just spot on, in my opinion:
I am for the most part convinced in this article to not require my students to gesture next year for a number of reasons:
1. It wasted a lot of time to have kids come up with, debate, and then vote on a specific action for a new word. It now seems like a vestige from targeted CI that was describe in The Big CI Book and many other places as a community builder and meaning reinforcer. But we have better community building techniques now via creative outlets like the Invisibles and OWI’s.
2. On a really practical level, it was hard for me to keep 5 classes straight, many of which came up with different gestures for the same word.
3. Not many of the kids actually did the gestures. I had to drag it out of them. They just wanted to concentrate on interpreting the meaning I was communicating. It seemed frustrating to them to have to remember to do the action for an emergent word while also paying attention to the conversation.
Ben here: I couldn’t agree more with Brett on these points. Moreover, there is no research on the gestures and I advocated their use for fifteen years while writing pro-TPRS books about how useful they are. But my final take-away on the gestures was that they never really were that useful. They made a nice show but I didn’t see where they actually helped. It took me fifteen years to figure that out. For more on how my thinking has evolved away from TPRS, see:
https://benslavic.com/blog/category/33-reasons-i-prefer-ntci/