Using Body Language As A Teaching Strategy For The Acquisition Of Vocabulary Items

Résumé: Vocabulary acquisition has been spotlighted by tremendous educational trends only during the past decades as a result of discovering its paramount importance in the teaching/ learning process. Accordingly, many vocabulary teaching strategies have been opted for by english as a foreign language teachers to help learners acquire this incremental aspect of language. Therefore, the major aim of the present study is discovering the effect of using body language as a teaching strategy on middle school pupils' vocabulary acquisition, and it is reached by means of an experiment as the research main tool. Here, second year middle school pupils at L'aiouer L'aid middle school were the research target population, from which, two groups of sixteen were chosen randomly as the experimental and the control group. Obviously, both groups have been pre-tested. The experimental treatment involves teaching learners vocabulary throughout the implementation of body language (gestures, eye contact, facial expressions, body movement…). The control group, on the other hand, has been taught via ordinary methods (translation, using dictionaries…). Later, both groups have been post-tested. The questionnaire, as a complementary tool, was handed to middle school teachers to reveal whether or not they, actually, use body language as a teaching strategy in english language teaching; as well as, revealing their impressions on its usefulness on vocabulary acquisition. Results of both the experiment and the questionnaire demonstrate that most middle school teachers make use of this strategy as it has a significant effect on enhancing learners' vocabulary repertoires.

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