The moment
The fan turns slowly overhead. A girl stands with her reader held close to her face, one finger moving under each word. “The crow… was… very… thirsty.” Her voice stays on one note to the last line. A pencil rolls off a desk and clicks on the floor. She finishes, sits down and breathes out in relief. The teacher asks what the crow did to reach the water. She looks at the page, then at the teacher, and says nothing.
She read every word correctly. Where did the story go?
The practice
Begin with a passage of eighty to a hundred and fifty words in which something moves. A fable works, or a poem, or a science paragraph where a seed splits open. Read it aloud once yourself so the children hear how it should sound.
Then go through it sentence by sentence and ask the class to find the action in each one. For each action, agree on one small gesture. Cupped hands become the pot. Pinched fingers become the beak. A hand lifted and dropped becomes a falling pebble. Keep gestures small enough to make sitting down, and let the children invent them. A gesture a child makes up is one she remembers.
Then read the passage together in chorus, each child making the gesture as the word arrives, so that voice and hand land together. After two rounds, move to pairs. One child reads, the other tells the story with her body, and then they swap.
Finally, read it once more with hands resting still. Ask the children to see each movement in their heads as they speak. Close with one or two questions about what happened and why.
It takes ten to fifteen minutes, three or four times a week, with the whole class or groups of four to six. You need only the text, though younger children enjoy a cup and a few pebbles to move as they read. If children stand, leave an arm’s length between them, and keep every gesture to the child’s own body.
What to watch for
When it is working, the voice begins to carry the meaning. Eyes lift from the page between sentences. The gesture starts a fraction before the word, which tells you the child is reading ahead.
When it isn’t working, the gestures become a show loose from the words, or a child copies her neighbour a beat late, following bodies instead of print. Shorten the passage and return to one sentence until word and movement meet.
Some children will not want to perform. Let them gesture under the desk, be the reader while a partner acts, or simply watch for a few days. Never force it. Participation that is chosen rather than imposed comes when the room feels safe. If a child still struggles to decode simple words after weeks of patient practice, or is hard to understand when she speaks, talk to her parents about an assessment by a speech and language therapist or a learning specialist.
Why it works
Arthur Glenberg and his colleagues asked young children to act out short texts with toys as they read. Children who moved the toys, and children taught to imagine moving them, remembered and understood the text markedly better than children who simply reread it. Glenberg argues that understanding a sentence means simulating it, building the scene with the same systems we use to see and act. The girl with the crow was saying words. She was not building anything.
The voice and the hands add to this. Jason Ozubko and Colin MacLeod found that words said aloud are remembered better than words read silently. Manuela Macedonia and Thomas Knösche found that adults learning a new language remembered words better when each came with a gesture, and Kalliopi Toumpaniari and her colleagues saw something similar in preschool children. In one second-grade classroom, Chase Young and Timothy Rasinski saw performance reading lift word recognition, fluency and expression, with struggling readers joining in as eagerly as anyone.
None of this surprises anyone who takes embodied cognition seriously. Meaning does not wait on the page. The reader makes it, with a body that knows what thirst feels like and how a stone drops. Good chanting and recitation has always known this. If a child can read every word aloud and still not see the crow, what have we been measuring when we call it reading?
Why this works: R1 Embodied cognition: why thinking is not only in the head · R11 Gesture as thinking: what the hands know before words · R41 Voice: speaking, singing and the body of language · R2 Enaction: knowing as a form of doing
Next in Voice and language: P24 Sound play and tongue twisters for early reading
Notes
- Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. P. (2004). Activity and imagined activity can enhance young children’s reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(3), 424–436.
- Glenberg, A. M. (2011). How reading comprehension is embodied and why that matters. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 4(1), 5–18.
- Ozubko, J. D., & MacLeod, C. M. (2010). The production effect in memory: Evidence that distinctiveness underlies the benefit. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(6), 1543–1547.
- Macedonia, M., & Knösche, T. (2011). Body in mind: How gestures empower foreign language learning. Mind, Brain, and Education, 5(4), 196–211.
- Toumpaniari, K., Loyens, S., Mavilidi, M.-F., & Paas, F. (2015). Preschool children’s foreign language vocabulary learning by embodying words through physical activity and gesturing. Educational Psychology Review, 27(3), 445–456.
- Young, C., & Rasinski, T. (2009). Implementing readers theatre as an approach to classroom fluency instruction. The Reading Teacher, 63(1), 4–13.