An experiment on gesture and fluency in two German schools

• Natasha Janzen Ulbricht ^[1]
  1. [1] Freie Universität Berlin
• Localización: ELT journal: An international journal for teachers of English to speakers of other languages, ISSN 0951-0893, Vol. 72, Nº 3, 2018, págs. 309-318
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Effective language-learning processes are key in multilingual societies, but past research on gesture and second-language acquisition has often focused on the relationship between gesture and cognition, but seldom on gesture as a teaching and learning tool. Although it is well established that gestures facilitate second-language learning, there is reason to think that different gestures may benefit children differentially. In the context of learning and performing a play, the experiment discussed in this article implements two English-language teaching methodologies, one with teacher gestures at the level of morphology and one with gestures at the sentence level. This experiment, with a diverse group of primary-school-age children, takes a naturalistic setting and shows that among the high and low performers there was a difference in long-term fluency development between the two experimental conditions. The data suggest that the fluency level of learners is predictive of which gesture type benefits fluency the most. Children who had a lower initial speech rate benefited more from teaching using gestures that are morphologically complex, whereas the children who had a higher initial speech rate benefited more from gestures at the sentence level.