A recent paper published by the Springer Education Psychology Review illustrates a study conducted on this. This study focused on the integration of gestures and pictures into the pedagogy when teaching foreign language vocabulary. The results show that this approach significantly improves the learning outcomes in these cases.
Learning a second language is for long recognized to have huge benefits for the development of children. Apart from the obvious direct benefits from the ability to communicate in the new language, researches have shown that it also brings out significant cognitive benefits like memory retention, decision making, focus and concentration, multitasking etc. Considering the increasing importance of these skills, there is significant focus in the learning of additional languages.
A second language is almost part of life for countries with bilingual and multilingual societies. Children pick up additional languages at very early stages there. But for children not exposed to this, learning a second language at a later stage (eg: in middle school) can be very challenging. Significant research has been done on the pedagogies related to this.
A recent paper published by the Springer Education Psychology Review illustrates a study conducted on this. This study focused on the integration of gestures and pictures into the pedagogy when teaching foreign language vocabulary. The results show that this approach significantly improves the learning outcomes in these cases.
This idea itself would sound very intuitive for broad language learning. But this specific focus on vocabulary and illustration of very specific strategies make this paper especially interesting.
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