Pantomime as an L2 Classroom Strategy

Interpersonal communication is generally accompanied by non‐verbal forms of communication. Language teachers, however, often reduce language teaching to the single channel of strictly linguistic features, thus ignoring kinetic sources of input in language instruction. At the same time, current research on learner cognitive styles and learning preferences underscores the importance of providing a variety of instructional modalities. This article presents a kinetic approach to language instruction that has proven successful in arousing student interest and promoting language acquisition—pantomime. Several examples are given to demonstrate how to include mimetic activities for a variety of language instruction outcomes.