The effects of physical body movement on preschoolers’ English vocabulary memory in mainland China

This study aims to investigate whether incorporating physical body movement into vocabulary teaching can improve the English vocabulary memory of kindergarten children in mainland China. The ideas of this study are derived from the Dual coding theory (DCT) and Total Physical Response (TPR). Built on these two theories, this study comes up with two teaching strategies, which are “triad code strategy” and “dual code strategy”. The triad code strategy integrates three elements- physical, visual, and verbal into teaching (i.e., using physical body movement, pictures, and verbal explanations). In contrast, dual code strategy only includes visual and verbal stimuli. This study adopted a quasi-experimental design. Participants were 32 children aged 4 to 5 years old (K2) whose mother tongue was Mandarin from a local kindergarten in Shanxi province, China. The data were analyzed by the /-test, and the main findings were summarized as below: (1). The triad code strategy was more effective in improving children’s English vocabulary memory than the dual code strategy; (2). The average improvement of animal and action vocabularies was significantly different for children in the triad code strategy condition; (3). Gender did not have any significant effects on children’s vocabulary memory. The results of this study serve as empirical evidence to fulfill the research gap and as insights for kindergarten teachers in improving their teaching practice.