In word and deed: Embodying early literacy learning in gestures and postures

AOSIS-accredited 'South African Journal of Childhood Education' submission on Early Childhood Development (ECD), written and researched by Caroline R. van der Mescht, with illustrations by Elliot Jaudz Oliver.

Introduction:

Rigorous large-scale research over the last decade has shown that South African learners are under-performing against international benchmarks in the key area of early reading literacy... [Studies] all highlight the inability of young South African learners to move beyond decoding and to read for meaning (Govender & Hugo 2020). [...] In response to this research NGOs and education departments have focused on providing materials designed to improve learner performance. However, the EGRS evaluation report acknowledges the fact that simply distributing the resources has not improved reading outcomes significantly and that the effectiveness of materials depends on how they are used by teachers (Taylor et al. 2017).

Although the importance of practice is increasingly acknowledged by the large-scale research mentioned above, teachers’ practices in Foundation Phase classrooms remain opaque. This article presents research into the gestures and postures which teachers use as complementary semiotics in the multimodal teaching of young learners. The non-verbal is a powerful but largely unacknowledged aspect of teachers’ practices although theories of embodied cognition point to its importance.

The goal of this article is to describe embodiment through teaching gestures and postures in authentic settings and thereby to establish criteria, descriptors and categories for similar research. It will be of especial interest to researchers but has implications for practice also.