Gesture-enhanced recasts have limited effects: A case of the regular past tense

Abstract

This study investigates whether gesture-enhanced recasts lead to better production of the English regular past tense. Fifty-nine low-intermediate ESL students at a US university took part in communicative activities in class, during which they received, respectively, no feedback, verbal recasts, or gesture-enhanced recasts, the latter being a verbal recast accompanied by a point-back gesture indicating the non-target-like use or absence of the past tense. All learners also completed two assessments, a grammar test about the regular past tense and an oral production test that was designed to elicit the regular past tense, as a pre-test, an immediate post-test, and a delayed post-test a week later. Then, a repeated-measure ANOVA was used to analyse the linguistic development, using the obtained test scores. The results showed that there was no difference across the conditions in the grammar test, owing to the ceiling effect. On the other hand, learners significantly improved from the pre-test to the post-test in the oral production test, but there were no differences across the conditions. This contradicts a previous finding that teachers’ pedagogical gestures during recasts better facilitated the development of locative prepositions. Further, this study discusses how learning types (rule-based vs. item-based) involved in two different linguistic targets and different gestures used in the two studies may affect the efficacy of recasts.

The Efficacy of Gesture on Second Language Pronunciation: An Exploratory Study of Handclapping as a Classroom Instructional Tool

“…This lack of empirical support seems surprising considering the positive effects of gesture generally found in other domains (for vocabulary, see Huang, Kim, & Christianson, 2019; Kelly, McDevitt, & Esch, 2009; Macedonia & Klimesch, 2014; Tellier, 2008; for grammar, see Nakatsukasa, 2016, but cf. Nakatsukasa, 2019; for comprehension, see Sueyoshi & Hardison, 2005). Therefore, the present study empirically examined the efficacy of instructional gestures on the development of L2 pronunciation.…”

Gestures as Scaffolding to Learn Vocabulary in a Foreign Language

“…For example, children were taught the Japanese word "tobe" (whose meaning is 'to jump' in English), and each time they were presented with this word, they physically executed the corresponding movement (to jump). The author observed an advantageous impact linked with the integration of gestures in FL word instruction, an effect that has been confirmed across various educational domains [78,79] (although see [80] for an alternative view).…”

Seeing or acting? The effect of performing gestures on foreign language vocabulary learning

“…In addition, empirical evidence on the role of movement in the teaching of an L2 reveals that better vocabulary learning is found when participants learn FL words accompanied by gestures that reflect the common use of objects whose names have to be learned (Feyereisen, 2006;Kelly et al, 2009;Macedonia & Klimesch, 2014). This beneficial effect associated with the use of gestures in the teaching of FL words has been demonstrated in several educational fields such as online courses, language learning, or technology use (Aleven & Koedinger, 2002;Bessen, 2015; although see Nakatsukasa, 2019). Moreover, the relevance of movement in language processing has been confirmed in many studies (Glenberg et al, 2004;Glenberg et al, 2008;Gluhareva & Prieto, 2017;Koriat & Pearlman-Avnion, 2003).…”