For about one third of children and adolescents in Germany, the language of schooling is not their first or only first language (Bryant & Rinker, 2021). This generates a particular need to understand practice activities which balance demands and support for learning (Muñoz, 2007). When perceiving a sequence of events, it is often possible to predict the next item (Grisoni et al., 2017). Given that many young L2 learners of English struggle with using grammatical morphemes, such as the plural {-s} and possessive {-s}, and that predictive processes play an important role in learning, it is unsurprising that researchers have called for experiments to determine which gestures help, and have mentioned linguistic units as relevant (Gullberg, 2013, p. 1872). Since instructional gestures can be independent of any given first language, teaching gestures may be particularly useful when teaching multilingual students.
The current study (N = 19) was conducted to ask whether gestures which embody grammatical morphemes during group instruction can contribute to procedural learning. To explore this issue, the speeded fragment completion task (Heyman et al., 2015) was adapted for gesture and used to assess response time before and after learning. In week 1 and 3 in a self-paced task, children completed 32 phrases such as the car's wind_w (window) or the cars cr_sh (crash). All phrases were completed in both a two-gesture condition (which visually distinguished between the plural and possessive "s") and a one-gesture condition (with a single "s" gesture). In week 2 training consisted of four hours of classroom activities aimed at encouraging learners to work together to create multisensory mental representations of these same L2 constructions. Some activities, such as performing gestures for word-picture pairs, took place in one large group. Other games such as "Gesture Memory" were played in small groups (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Sample Gesture Memory items (images adapted from Unsplash)
A linear mixed effects model fit to participants' button press latencies shows a decrease in mean response times after instruction in the two-gesture test condition (p = .039*). This increase in procedural learning suggests that diverse learners can benefit from embodied L2 group instruction visually distinguishing between grammatical morphemes which differ in meaning but sound the same.
References
Bryant, D., & Rinker, T. (2021). Der Erwerb des Deutschen im Kontext von Mehrsprachigkeit. Narr Francke Attempto.
Grisoni, L., Miller, T. M., & Pulvermüller, F. (2017). Neural Correlates of Semantic Prediction and Resolution in Sentence Processing. The Journal of Neuroscience, 37(18), 4848–4858. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2800-16.2017
Gullberg, M. (2013). Gestures and second language acquisition. In C. Müller, A. J. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & S. Tessendorf (Eds.), Body-Language-Communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction (pp. 1868–1875). De Gruyter Mouton.
Heyman, T., De Deyne, S., Hutchison, K. A., & Storms, G. (2015). Using the speeded word fragment completion task to examine semantic priming. Behavior Research Methods, 47(2), 580–606. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-014-0496-5
Muñoz, C. (2007). Age-related differences and second language learning practice. In R. DeKeyser (Ed.), Practice in a Second Language: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology (pp. 229–255). CUP. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667275.014
