Long‐Term Effects of Gestures on Memory for Foreign Language Words Trained in the Classroom

Language and gesture are viewed as highly interdependent systems. Besides supporting communication, gestures also have an impact on memory for verbal information compared to pure verbal encoding in native but also in foreign language learning. This article presents a within‐subject longitudinal study lasting 14 months that tested the use of gestures in the classroom, with the experimenter presenting the items to be acquired. Participants learned 36 words distributed across two training conditions: In the audio‐visual condition subjects read, heard, and spoke the words; in the gestural condition subjects additionally accompanied the words with symbolic gestures. Memory performance was assessed through cued native‐to‐foreign translation tests at five time points. The results show that gestures significantly enhance vocabulary learning in quantity and over time. The findings are discussed in terms of Klimesch's connectivity model (CM) of information processing. Thereafter, a code, a word, is better integrated into long‐term memory if it is deep, that is, if it is comprised of many interconnected components.     

Infusing Physical Activities Into the Classroom: Effects on Preschool Children's Geography Learning

In this intervention study, we investigated the effects of physical activities that were integrated into a geography task on preschool children's learning performance and enjoyment. Eight childcare centers with 87 four‐to‐five‐year‐old children were randomly assigned across an integrated physical activity condition, an unintegrated physical activity condition, and a control condition without physical activity. Children learned the names and a typical animal from each of the six continents using a floor‐mounted world map with soft toy animals. Both learning conditions with physical activities showed higher performance than the learning condition without physical activities on an immediate retention test, and on a delayed retention test administered five weeks later. In addition, children in the physical activity conditions (integrated and nonintegrated) enjoyed their learning method the most. Infusing task‐relevant physical activities into the classroom and the learning task is discussed as a promising way to improve children's learning, enjoyment, and health.     

Seeing Iconic Gestures While Encoding Events Facilitates Children's Memory of These Events

An experiment with 72 three-year-olds investigated whether encoding events while seeing iconic gestures boosts children's memory representation of these events. The events, shown in videos of actors moving in an unusual manner, were presented with either iconic gestures depicting how the actors performed these actions, interactive gestures, or no gesture. In a recognition memory task, children in the iconic gesture condition remembered actors and actions better than children in the control conditions. Iconic gestures were categorized based on how much of the actors was represented by the hands (feet, legs, or body). Only iconic hand-as-body gestures boosted actor memory. Thus, seeing iconic gestures while encoding events facilitates children's memory of those aspects of events that are schematically highlighted by gesture.     

Examining the interplay of affect and self regulation in the context of clinical reasoning

There is an active strand of research on how affect and self-regulatory activities influence performance and learning outcomes, but the mechanisms through which they interact during learning remain poorly understood. Additionally, these constructs have been under-researched in medical education. Using multimodal data in the context of a clinical reasoning task for medical students learning case diagnosis, we explored the temporal nature of cognition, affect, motivation, and self-regulation. With a sample of n = 10 medical students, we collected data on self-regulated learning (SRL) processes through think-aloud analyses; emotion data through facial expressions; and achievement goal orientations and habitual emotion regulation strategies through self-report questionnaires. Results from our sequential data mining techniques and quantitative analyses suggested that high-performing medical students (who arrived at an accurate diagnosis) differed from low-performing students (who did not arrive at correct diagnosis): Low performers reported higher performance goal orientation, and expressed more emotions overall, than high performers. High performers exhibited marginally more monitoring SRL behaviours, while low performers tended to orient and reorient throughout the task. High and low performers also differed on the co-occurrences of, and sequential transitions between, emotions and SRL behaviours. The implications of these findings with respect to research and medical education are discussed.     

Third graders' performance predictions: calibration deflections and academic success

This study focuses on third grade pupils' (9 to 10 years old) ability to predict their performance in a given task and on the correspondence between the accuracy and adequacy of the predictions on the one hand, and the academic achievement on the other. The study involved 713 pupils from 29 Estonian schools. The pupils' performance predictions about a short-term memory recognition task and their actual scores were used to specify differences in prediction errors and the correspondence of these errors with academic achievement. In line with earlier research, the results indicate that low performers often overestimated themselves and their predictions tended to be most inaccurate, whereas high performers were more accurate although they often underestimated their performance. Pupils with lower academic achievement often provided extensive overestimations of the memory task. Underestimations, together with better accuracy, characterised children with a higher achievement level. This can indicate a meaningful accord between specific prediction errors and broader achievement at school.     

象似性手势在儿童早期词汇学习中的作用

象似性手势是指在形式和表达方式上与其所伴随的言语的语义内容密切相关的手势。儿童通常在18~24个月产生象似性手势,到3岁时能准确理解象似性手势的含义。象似性手势的产生和理解与儿童年龄呈正相关,且受文化等社会因素的影响较大。象似性手势能够揭示儿童的象征发展水平,解释并再现言语组织过程,补充言语中未表达的信息,促进多通道表征,提高词汇加工效率,因而有助于儿童的词汇理解、记忆和泛化。未来相关研究应进一步扩大象似性手势的研究对象,考察象似性手势与具身认知的关系及其对儿童词汇学习的多方面影响,这将有助于提高未来研究成果对教育实践的指导作用。     

Shyness and Chinese and English Vocabulary Skills in Hong Kong Kindergartners

Research Findings: This study examined relations between parent-rated shyness and children's vocabulary skills in 54 Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners who learned English as a foreign language at school. Receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary were assessed both in Chinese and in English. Parent-rated shyness was uniquely associated with children's receptive vocabulary skills in both English and Chinese even after parents' education levels and socioeconomic status and children's nonverbal reasoning skill were statistically controlled. Practice or Policy: The findings suggest that shyness is associated with both first and second language learning.     

The Effects of Reciprocal Imitation on Teacher–Student Relationships and Student Learning Outcomes

Neuroscientific and developmental psychological research in imitation has yielded important insights into building teacher–student relationships and enhancing students' learning. This study investigated the effects of reciprocal imitation on teacher–student relationships and students' learning outcomes in one‐on‐one teacher–student interactions. In a within‐subjects design, participants learned eight English vocabulary words under two conditions: one condition paired with teacher's imitative behaviors and the other with teacher's random behaviors. Students' self‐rating surveys and quiz scores on new words were assessed. When the teacher imitated the students' behaviors in interactions, the students reported significantly higher perceptions of rapport, more confidence in and satisfaction with learning outcomes, and had significantly higher quiz scores. Results had important implications for teachers in using imitation as an effective teaching tool to build teacher–student relationships and enhance students' learning.     

Improving Performance Without Training: A Three Step Approach

Condition 1 showed that employees recorded high percentages of completed tasks; and task performance was shown to slightly improve. At that point in the project, recording accuracy was at it's highest level. Condition 2 illustrated a continuance of high employee records of completed tasks but also showed that actual task performance considerably increased so that there was greater self-recording accuracy. Then, during Condition 3, actual task performance increased more so that it even more closely reflected self-recorded measures. Each of the steps discussed thus far could be sufficient individually to facilitate accurate self-recording and task performance gains, although each appeared to have gained additional strength by being collectively applied. The cost of the present organizational intervention was very low. The costs included material duplication costs and approximately 30 minutes of management time per day. Management time was used to make concession observations (management records), compute performance data, and provide feedback to the employee. Employees worked the same number of hours as in Baseline. Based on this breakdown, the approximate weekly cost of this project was about $30.00. The total cost could be reduced further, perhaps, by monitoring less frequently and reducing the frequency of feedback sessions as employee performance stabilized at higher levels. Thus, the longer this project would run, the less expensive it might become. The steps implemented during this project might easily be applied to other jobs that produce easily observable outputs and could also be applied to other work settings. Future research efforts that would identify cost-effective ways to stimulate and maintain high levels of accurate self-recording might provide today's managers several options that could all yield accurate data for organizational management. Other research efforts centered on specific analyses of participatory standard setting, peer reinforcement, and self-reinforcement for task performance could provide additional insight into the areas of job analysis and employee productivity. Lastly, increased knowledge about the long term effects of self-recording could be gained through future research methods that first established high recording accuracies and task performance levels, then evaluated maintenance procedures for these methods. Implications of successive research studies which clearly show that employee performance can be improved by rewarding performers for accurate self-recording could be profound.     

Shape and the first hundred nouns

This paper reports evidence from a longitudinal study in which children's attention to shape in a laboratory task of artificial noun learning was correlated with a rate shift in noun acquisitions. Eight children were tested in the laboratory at 3-week intervals beginning when they had less than 25 nouns in their productive vocabulary (M age=17 months). Children were presented with a novel word generalization task at each session. Additionally, the study examined the kinds of words the children learned early, based on parent reports, and the statistical regularities inherent in those vocabularies. The results indicate that as children learned nouns, they also learned to attend to shape in the novel word task. At the same time, children showed an acceleration in new noun production outside of the laboratory.     

Metrical stress sensitivity in young children and its relationship to phonological awareness and reading

This paper reports two studies of young English‐speaking children's ability to cope with changes to the metrical stress pattern of spoken words and the relationship between this ability, phonological awareness and early reading development. Initially, 39 children aged 4 and 5 years were assessed on their ability to identify mispronounced words, including words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed. The children were significantly worse at identifying words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed than words that were mispronounced in other ways. The second study was a cross‐sectional comparison of 31 5, 6 and 7‐year‐old children's performance on the metrical stress reversal condition of the mispronunciation task. Measures of the children's written language skills and phonological awareness were also taken. The 7‐year‐old children outperformed the 5‐year‐olds on the metrical stress task. Performance on this measure was associated with most of the measures of phonological awareness and literacy, and was associated with rhyme awareness and spelling ability after age had been taken into account. Moreover, metrical stress sensitivity could account for variance in spelling ability after phonological awareness had been taken into account, and after vocabulary had been taken into account. This suggests that stress sensitivity may influence spelling development in a way that is independent of its contribution to phonological representations.     

Building Vocabulary Knowledge in Preschoolers Through Shared Book Reading and Gameplay

This study moves beyond previous investigations to examine whether an educational intervention combining shared book reading with a vocabulary game increases children's vocabulary knowledge. Four‐year‐olds (N = 44) were randomly assigned to dyads in either an intervention (shared book reading plus vocabulary review game) or comparison condition (shared book reading, after‐reading vocabulary review, and game that did not teach vocabulary). After two 30‐min sessions, results demonstrated that the intervention condition outperformed the comparison condition on measures of receptive and expressive knowledge of taught vocabulary words. Children in the intervention group who scored the lowest at pretest on the receptive measure saw the most gains in taught word knowledge. Findings suggest that combining vocabulary gameplay with shared book reading improved children's learning of the vocabulary words in comparison to a comparison group.     

Development of decoding,reading comprehension,vocabulary and spelling during the elementary school years

The goal of this study was (1) to investigate the development of decoding(efficiency), reading comprehension, vocabulary and spelling during theelementary school years and (2) to determine the differences between poor,average and good performers with regard to the development of theseskills. Twice each year two standardized tests for each skill wereadministered. For two successive periods, one of the tests for each skill wasthe same. To describe the development in terms of a latent variable evolvingacross grades, the structured-means version of the structural equationmodel was used. The growth was expressed in terms of effect size. Withrespect to the first question, clear seasonal effects were found for readingcomprehension, vocabulary and spelling, while the seasonal effect fordecoding efficiency was restricted to the early grades. Progress tended tobe greater from fall to spring than from spring to fall. For decodingefficiency, and to a lesser degree for vocabulary and spelling, growthshowed a declining trend across grades. For reading comprehension, theprogress in grade 2 was lower than the progress in grade 3, but progresswas declining across higher grades. With respect to the second question,it appeared that initially low performers on reading comprehension,vocabulary and spelling tended to show a greater progress, especially inperiods where the largest amount of instruction was given. Although it wasfound that the low, medium and high ability groups remain in the sameorder, as far as their means are concerned, these findings do not confirmthe existence of a Matthew effect for reading comprehension, vocabularyand spelling. For decoding efficiency no clear differential effect could befound: the gap between the poor and good performers did not widen overtime for this skill.     

Predictors of Grade 2 Word Reading and Vocabulary Learning from Grade 1 Variables in Spanish‐Speaking Children: Similarities and Differences

We examined the components of first (L1) and second language (L2) phonological processing that are related to L2 word reading and vocabulary. Spanish‐speaking English learners (EL) were classified as average or low readers in grades 1 and 2. A large number of children who started out as poor readers in first grade became average readers in second grade while vocabulary scores were more stable. Binary logistic regressions examined variables related to classifications of consistently average, consistently low, or improving on reading or vocabulary across grades. Good L2 phonological short‐term memory and phonological awareness scores predicted good reading and vocabulary scores. L1 and L2 measures differentiated consistently good performers from consistently low performers, while only L2 measures differentiated children who improved from children who remained low performers. Children who are EL should be screened on measures of pseudoword repetition and phonological awareness with low scorers being good candidates for receiving extra assistance in acquiring L2 vocabulary and reading. This study suggests measures that can be used to select children who have a greater likelihood of experiencing difficulties in reading and vocabulary.     

Field News

Abstract

The effects of increased environmental stimulation on the performance of hyperactive children appear to depend on the locus of that stimulation. Laboratory research has suggested that increased distal and peripheral stimulation reduce activity and may improve performance; the effects of increased within-task stimulation have not been conclusive. The present study sought to test the effects of within-task stimulation on activity and on performance of an academic spelling task in a classroom setting. Hyperactive and normal children learned a set of spelling words with or without added color, movement, and increased size in a repeated measures design. The results support the view that (a) hyperactive children have more difficulty than normals separating the relevant aspects of a task from additional within-task stimulation and so show a slower adjustment to high levels of within-task stimulation (i.e., make more errors initially), and (b) high levels of activity during learning predict later performance deficits for both hyperactive and normal children. The increased activity during learning acquisition brought about by added within-task stimulation can be interpreted as incipient support for Keogh’s hypothesis that motor activity may disrupt information acquisition in hyperactive children (23).     

It's story time!: exploring the potential of multimodality in oral storytelling to support children's vocabulary learning

Although many studies have been done on the benefits of parent/teacher‐child interactions during shared storybook reading or read‐aloud sessions, very few have examined the potential of professional storytellers' oral discourse to support children's vocabulary learning. In those storytelling sessions conducted by professional storytellers, the process of telling a story is typically not accompanied by a book, but only by the teller's well‐coordinated gestures, facial expressions and voice modulations. In this study, I perform a multimodal analysis of storytellers' oral discourse recorded during two storytelling sessions for four‐to‐five‐year‐old children. The study aims to (1) find out the specific types of vocal and visual features accompanying the spoken words which were unlikely to be known by the children but used by the storytellers for representations of events and characters, and (2) explore the potential of these multimodal features in oral storytelling to support children's inferring of word meanings. The study offers insights into multimodality in oral storytelling and implications for exploring the potential of multimodal features in this form of literacy practice to support children's vocabulary learning.     

Shared Book Reading and Head Start Preschoolers' Vocabulary Learning: The Role of Book-Related Discussion and Curricular Connections

This study examined the ways in which the language that Head Start teachers used during book reading, as well as the extent to which they made explicit connections between book reading and other instructional activities, were linked to preschoolers' vocabulary development. Participants included 10 Head Start teachers and 153 children in their classrooms. Research Findings: Analyses revealed that teachers varied substantially in the frequency and nature of their book-related remarks, and connections between books and the broader curriculum were relatively few in number and constrained in nature. On average, children learned more words over the course of the year when teachers used more contextualized and decontextualized talk during book readings. Contextualized book-related talk was most positively associated with learning among children with relatively low initial vocabulary knowledge. Too few connections between book reading and the curriculum were observed to afford analysis of their contributions to children's vocabulary skills. Practice or Policy: The findings show the nuanced ways in which shared book reading, a critical part of the preschool day, is linked to vocabulary growth among the nation's most vulnerable learners. The results also highlight potential avenues through which readings could be strategically individualized to optimize early vocabulary development.     

Implications of domain‐general “psychological support skills” for transfer of skill and acquisition of expertise

The article proposes that individuals who acquire certain psychological support skills may experience accelerated learning and enhanced performance in many domains. In support of this proposal, we present evidence that these skills enhance learning and performance, that they are domain‐general in that they can be applied in a variety of domains, and that they can be taught and learned. We also discuss two implications of the skills for current theories of expertise. The first is that any observed transfer of expertise between domains might result as much from the support supplied by application of the skills during learning and performance as from any direct transfer achieved due to two domains sharing similar task elements. The second is that use of these skills might contribute to an understanding of how performers sustain the motivation necessary for the extended period of deliberate practice required to maximize skill acquisition.     

高职高专公共外语学生英语词汇学习之探究

对当前高校学生英语词汇学习的现状进行了调查分析,指出当今高校学生词汇学习的方法不容乐观。提出在学习词汇时应把握科学性、交际性、整体性和系统性原则。     

Grounded blends and mathematical gesture spaces: developing mathematical understandings via gestures

This paper examines how a person’s gesture space can become endowed with mathematical meaning associated with mathematical spaces and how the resulting mathematical gesture space can be used to communicate and interpret mathematical features of gestures. We use the theory of grounded blends to analyse a case study of two teachers who used gestures to construct a graphical anti-derivative while working on a professional development task in a calculus modelling activity. Results indicate that mathematical gesture spaces can encourage mathematical experimentation, lighten the cognitive load for students and can be limited by a person’s physical constraints.