Mind and Body Learn Together: Embodied Cognition and Language Learning

The study aims at investigating how the fitness between learners' learning styles and adopted learning modalities influences the learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) by elementary school students. A quantitative research was adopted. 87 fifth graders participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to three groups of learning modalities: video, gesture-based, and 3D virtual. They learned 18 English phrases related to motions for 3 times, once a week. Both performance test and learning style questionnaire were administered after the treatment completed. The analysis results of the current study show that the EFL learners' performances did not differ among the three learning modalities. However, EFL learners' learning styles also influence their performance. Implications of this study for language education and teaching are discussed.