Document Details
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Document Type |
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Thesis |
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Document Title |
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The Effect of Gesture on EFL Classroom’s Interaction and Vocabulary Retention: الإنجليزية كلغة أجنبية تأثير الإيماء على التفاعل و حفظ المفردات في فصول اللغة الإنجليزية |
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Subject |
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English Language Institute |
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Document Language |
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Arabic |
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Abstract |
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The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to investigate the impact, on English vocabulary retention, of use of self-produced gestures as part of teaching and learning vocabulary in the Saudi secondary school EFL context. It also aimed to explore the impact of such gesturing on classroom interaction. Fifty-nine female second-year high school students at a government-run school in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, participated, along with their female EFL teacher. Over the course of four sessions, the teacher was observed teaching her subject matter to students in two phases: pre-intervention and intervention. In the intervention phase, the teacher incorporated researcher-designed, meaning-depictive gestures into her instruction for each new vocabulary item. Over the two phases, students had to learn 48 new English vocabulary items, specifically selected for the study. The teacher in the pre-intervention phase taught her students 24 vocabulary items in the way she would normally teach such vocabulary. Prior to the intervention phase she was trained to use the researcher-designed gestures while teaching the remaining 24 target vocabulary items. The study used observation checklists for both phases to look at classroom interaction qualitatively; quantitative pre- and post-intervention tests to measure vocabulary retention; and a follow up interview after the study with the teacher participant. Findings revealed that the intervention involving researcher-designed gestures had a significant impact on EFL Saudi students’ vocabulary retention, both immediate and delayed. This finding is consistent with embodied cognition theory as well as theories on multimodal storage in memory. Moreover, gesture was found to have a positive impact on classroom interaction. These findings support the hypothesis that the addition of embodiment (gesture) as an encoding dimension has a positive and significant impact on students’ vocabulary retention and classroom interaction. It is therefore concluded that gesture is a useful tool to be adopted inside the classroom, and suggest further research to address the issues of gesture impact on learning.
Keywords: gesture impact, vocabulary, delayed, immediate, retention, self-produced, interaction, teaching English, Saudi EFL contex |
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Supervisor |
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Dr. Fatimah M. A. Alghamdi |
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Thesis Type |
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Master Thesis |
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Publishing Year |
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1438 AH
2017 AD |
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Added Date |
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Tuesday, September 26, 2017 |
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Researchers
| هيفاء حسين الغامدي | AlGhamdi, Haifa Hussain | Researcher | Master | |
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