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How to Teach Using Gestures and
D by Tara Amtsen 62,184 views | 2 com
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A lot of teaching English is about acting.
178
oe Keeping your energy high and
Ei being creative with your lessons
will make your students more
attentive. Outside of role play
Dp activities
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(nttp://busyteacher.org/classroom_activities-speaking/roleplays/), you can
use gestures and mime in many different ways. These can aide your
students in communicating, understanding, and participating during your
lessons.
How To Proceed
6 Giving Directions
Using particular gestures or expressions in the classroom will lead
students to associate them with a particular thing. For example, if
you always use the same gesture when you say “Please stand up.”
students will become accustomed to it and stand up when you use
that gesture even if you occasionally leave out the oral instruction.178
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You can have gestures for when you want students to repeat
something after you, make groups, or sit down too. This can be
especially handy when you want to communicate something to
your students in a noisy setting. For instance, if you say “Please
turn your desks to make groups of four.” students will begin moving
around and making noise as they rearrange their desks so they
may miss your verbal instructions to sit down but if you also
gesture for them to sit down, at least some students will see it and
react accordingly which will cause the remaining students to follow
suit.
Vocabulary
Using gestures and mime is important when it comes to vocabulary
(http://busyteacher.org/classroom_activities-vocabulary-
worksheets/) too. You can use them to elicit certain words and
phrases from students _(http://busyteacher.org/3772-how-to-elicit-
vocabulary.html). If you teach very young students, it is also
common to associate gestures with words to help students
remember vocabulary better. Using the same gesture every time
you say a particular word or phrase will help these students
associate the two.
Practice
In practice dialogues, you can incorporate gestures and mime. If
you are teaching a conversation where a customer is complaining
about something to a store clerk, for instance, you can tell students
that the store clerk should act completely shocked at hearing the
news, look apologetic, or whatever else you can think of to make
the scenario more realistic. In a conversation where two people are
meeting for the first time, have students shake hands as they would
do a real life situation. These details make practicing dialogues
more fun and interesting.6 Production
178
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Activities and games which use gestures and mime can be fun for
the whole class. If you have just finished a section on feelings
(http://ousyteacher.org/classroom_activities-
vocabulary/feelings_and_emotions-worksheets/), make a list of
feelings on the board and have students choose a slip of paper
from a hat. Each slip of paper should contain a sentence such as
“You are happy.” Students should keep their sentences a secret.
Have one volunteer at a time mime his/her sentence while the rest
of the class tries to guess It. This would be a good review activity.
To check individual comprehension, you can use the same basic
idea but instead turn it into an interview activity where students
have a sheet of paper with all the emotions listed as well as their
secret emotion. The idea is that students go around the classroom
(http://busyteacher.org/classroom_activities-speaking/mingling-
activities/) miming and guessing emotions in pairs and getting a
student signature for each emotion. When you go through the
worksheet as a class you can have students read aloud from their
worksheets sentences like “Jane is sad.” and ask Jane to mime
being sad for the class.
Cultural
If you are teaching English in a country such as Japan, it is
important to consider the fact that lots of communication is
nonverbal. When your students have the opportunity to go abroad
or interact with other native English speakers, your students may
use polite language (http//busyteacher.org/classroom_activities-
vocabulary/polite_requests-worksheets/) but if their body language
is interpreted differently, they will not have made as good an
impression as they were capable of. Your use of simple gestures
will help your students. For instance, you can shrug when you do
not know the answer, wave to students when you see them outside
the classroom, and gesture for students to come up to the board.
This will expose students to the types of gestures common in aculture different from their own. Certain gestures may be the same
but have different meanings so it is important to explain what they
mean to you so that students are not confused.
Gestures and mime can be really helpful in
numerous classroom situations and using them
often can assist both you and your students.
Do not force yourself to use certain gestures but do what comes naturally
aygind when you find what works for you, stick with it and your students will
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