How Does an Embodied Approach to the Curriculum Impact upon the Acquisition of Grammar in an ESL Classroom?

Abstract

This was a small scale, practitioner-researched study involving 10 participants which took place in a pre-intermediate English classroom in a Dublin adult language school in February 2018. The research question was designed in response to problems observed within the researcher’s classroom, namely, a lack of cohesive grammar integration within the CLT curriculum resulting in a lack of student engagement. In order to address the research question, the study explored literature in the fields of embodiment, Second Language Acquisition and Drama in Education to review established theories, investigate relevant research and explore current practise. A mixed-methods approach was designed in order to collect both qualitative and quantitative data during the study and a system of content analysis employed to categorise and assess the data. The chosen methods were a Likert-scale survey (completed pre and post-intervention), a structured third party observation, audio-recordings of the embodied activities and student’s reflections, and still photographs of selected embodied activities. The findings of the study suggest that the embodied approach enhanced student comprehension and retention of the target grammar and increased student engagement and autonomy. The findings also suggest that the use of drama allowed for a deeper level of collaborative learning by blurring the usual classroom boundaries, encouraging a more natural social interaction and enabling students to create their own meaningful context through drama and embodiment. It is the position of this thesis that an embodied approach to L2 acquisition is not only beneficial, but necessary to meet the needs of L2 learners.