Multimodal Literacies MOOC’s Updates

Drama;a pedagogical practice that locates linguistic meanings in the context of spatial, tactile, or gestural meanings

In our daily life, we use our gestures unconsciously. They are parts of our communication. And we can say that we use too many common body language in different cultures. They are international. Even we don't know the foreign language we can express our feelings by using our gestures.

I think drama is a good example of pedagogical practice that students can use spatial, tactile and gestural meanings. So I use different drama, role- play activities while teaching English language.

You can create many activities using drama skills. For example, students can try to act a dialogue only use their gestures and their classmates try to guess the context of the dialogue. Our they can adapt a written dialogue to sign language. And then perform it.

Some researchers claim that the language we learn affects the way we think. Early learned differences in the linguistic coding of space can modify or change aspects of nonlinguistic spatial cognition. In one study, native English and Korean speakers are given a nonlinguistic spatial task that tested their memory for the location of a ball, either on or above a table. English speakers uniformly distinguished the two categories of relationships by using two different spatial terms (e.g., “on” vs “above”), the Korean speakers did not. It shows us nonlinguistic spatial representation are immune to the effects of cross-linguistic differences.