When you’re explaining something new have you ever noticed your hands gesturing frantically about? I for one have a tendency to fling my arms about when explaining something complex to others. I’ve always been a bit self-conscious about this habit, but according to new research from the University of Chicago, this might be a good (although annoying) habit.
By having volunteers solve a logic problem and then having them explain how to solve it before making a second attempt, it was discovered that the more hand gestures the volunteers used when explaining how to solve the puzzle, the faster they were able to complete the puzzle during their second try. This is because when you use hand gestures to explain a concept, you are creating a visual representation of that concept. And creating a visual representation of a complex concept helps you understand it more easily.
So how can this help struggling readers? In the experiment hand gesturing helped the volunteers that naturally used hand gestures. Plus it would be hard to get struggling readers to explain how to learn to read when the exact process is still not even fully understood. But something you can do is use gestures that connect to different sounds and words and to get your student to repeat these gestures. This way they can have a concrete representation of the concepts they struggle with (even if they didn’t originally come up with the representation).
Because I can't use hand gestures in my writing, a visual representation might explain this idea better. Here is a video of a teacher using this technique in her reading instruction. (Its kind of a long video so… you can see her guiding her students to use gestures at 3:46, and you can see a student using this technique to help himself when he gets stuck on a word at 6:53)
Additional Blog Posts on Helping Struggling Readers:
5 Warning Signs That a Student Is Struggling With Reading
5 Easy Steps to Reach Reluctant Readers and ESL Students
Reading Strategies that Work for Struggling Readers: Annotating Text
Reading Strategies that Work for Struggling Readers: KWL Charts
How Fun Reading Practice Can Help Struggling Readers
Free E-Book:
Surprising Findings of Reading Research- provides the latest research on how you can improve your reading instruction to best help struggling readers.