How do teacher's gestures help young children in second language acquisition?

Marion Tellier (1)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

This article aims to discus what we know about the impact of gestures on memorisation of items. There have been few studies on that subject so far. I am specifically working on the impact of teaching gestures (very iconic movements used by teachers in classroom, especially in second language teaching) on young children (aged 5 years old). This article describes an experiment in which young subjects had to memorise words in L1. Theses words were heard on a video and were illustrated by gestures. Some of the children just had to look at the gestures and repeat the words heard, others had also to reproduce the gestures they saw. Results show that in a free recall task, children who have reproduced the gestures memorise better than those who only looked at them and than those of the control group. These results concern short term memorisation of L1 words but will help us to conduct further experiments on long term memorisation of L2 lexical items.

Mots clés: teaching gestures; foreign language teaching; lexicon; memorisation; children

Mots clés: gestes pédagogiques; enseignement des langues étrangères; lexique; enfants

Domaines: Linguistique; Education

Marion Tellier. How do teacher's gestures help young children in second language acquisition?. International Society of Gesture Studies, ISGS, Jun 2005, Lyon, France. pp.en ligne. ⟨hal-00433380⟩