Many of us use gestures or hand signs of some variety to associate with vocabulary words. I've been thinking a lot recently about the process of reading, and why it can get so overwhelming. I decided to try a little twist on something old-ish to see if I could access reading to prep them for a text.
We had several new vocabulary words, all of which were pretty interesting. You need some verbs in order to do this. You also need some agreed-upon, constituted hand gestures: and, but, is, because, end of sentence (we use a bell for this).
Our list was:
kisses in a friendly way
falls over head first
is very drunk
shakes at the knees
i am deficient in spirit
accidentally
I stumble around
Scar
With the price having been paid
For the pleasure of a morning walk
We created, together, a hand sign for the first two words. For the verbs, we also gestured person while we gestured the word. For the nouns, we gestured the case after the word. Then I told them a small story without speaking at all. I told them they were simply going to say whatever I gestured at them. I pointed at David, and they all said David. I gestured falls over head first, and that is what they said.
The story ended up going: David falls over head first. David falls over head first because David is very drunk.
Then we picked two new words and gestured those, until we had the ten on the list. After each two, I gestured a small story at them, incorporating those new words and sometimes words previously established (but still on the list). For example: For the pleasure of a morning walk, Charles stumbles around. Because Charles stumbles around, he accidentally falls over head first. Charles has a scar.
Afterwards, I split them into pairs and gave them a few minutes to write their own two to three sentence story. They had to use mostly words from the list, and they had to be able to gesture everything. They had to gesture person and case for the relevant words. After each story, we went back and summarized the story together to make sure we were clear on the plot. David and Charles were in a lot of them. :)
When we looked at the text after that, they said they were able to read with what felt like increased fluency - they'd already "read" some of this. They were not only hearing the vocabulary in context, they also had to slow down and think about processing the vocabulary contextually, which is part of the struggle of reading. It also gave them a visual for that reading process, which is something students struggle with in second languages.
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