Resumen de An experiment on gesture and fluency in two German schools
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.
