(Amphithéâtre)

Tellier, Marion (UFR linguistique de l’Université Paris 7, Paris)

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

In the teaching of foreign languages to young children, gestures (iconics, mimes) are widely used by the teacher to translate the meaning of the lexicon without using the mother tongue. The study of such a professional gesture which we call “educational gesture” raises a methodological question : how can we assess its impact on both the understanding and memorising of the lexicon by young learners ? Through experiments involving French children (aged 4-6) learning English, our research tries to suggest ways to analyse this particular phenomenon. On the one hand, we have a teacher whose gestures are infl uenced by his identity, his cultural background and his own perception of the world and on the other hand, we have children with their own conception of the world and different backgrounds. How can these two understand each other through gestures ? The whole problematic is in the creation of educational gestures. The teacher has to chose the most prototypic and stereotypic representation of a word, the one which is likely to be the children’s. Children need to learn in a multimodal dimension : listening, visualising, gesturing are important actions in the process of memorising. How can gestures help the young students to remember new items of vocabulary ? Is learning words with gestures more effi cient than learning without any motion ? This is what our current work is about. We are testing children in short term and long term memory tasks in order to assess if they remember better words when they are illustrated by gestures.