Studies Find Students Learn More by 'Acting Out' Text

By Sarah D. Sparks

While most readers might think of curling up in a quiet place with a good book, a new series of studies suggests young students may comprehend more if they take a more active approach to reading.

A series of experiments by researchers at Arizona State University in Tempe and the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that students can understand and infer more by physically acting out text—either in real life or virtually—than by reading alone.

In the most recent of the experiments, published in the June issue of the journal Scientific Studies of Reading, researchers found that elementary mathematics students who acted out text in word problems were more accurate and less distracted than those who didn’t.

“We know that children have difficulty doing story problems” in math, said Arthur M. Glenberg, a psychologist and the studies’ lead author. “The idea is if we can help children understand the story better, they will understand the story problem better.”

Both the math study and earlier experiments on basic reading comprehension explore the concept that students “embody” what they read in order to understand it.

Embodied, or grounded, cognition posits that meaning in language comes when words or phrases are mentally mapped onto memories of real experiences and perceptions. The concept’s popularity has had a surge of support thanks to recent brain-imaging research such as a seminal 2004 study published in the journal Neuron. That study, by the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, found that reading action words like “kick” or “lick” activated motor areas of the brain associated with moving the foot or tongue.

“When people started seeing the evidence that the brain really works in an embodied way, that coupled with the neuroscience really got people’s attention,” said Lawrence W. Barsalou, a psychologist at Emory University, in Atlanta. Though not part of the studies, he also researches embodied cognition.

Studies since then have found that people process more-abstract words and sentences similarly, and even conceptualize words spatially based on where they likely would be in real life, such as the word “wheel” being toward the ground.

“When we as readers are thinking about what we’re reading, we are embodying it even if we aren’t literally moving our arms. We are calling upon our experiences,” said Mr. Glenberg. “Good readers are doing things like that all the time, but it’s not quite as conscious when they are doing it in domains they understand because they are doing it so quickly.”

Language Disconnect

Yet the Arizona and Wisconsin researchers found this learning process can lead to a disconnect for some students between oral and written language. Babies often learn spoken words coupled with actions or objects; a mother tells her child to “wave bye-bye,” while waving herself, or a father asks, “Do you want your bear?” while holding the stuffed animal.

By contrast, the authors found, students may learn to read words divorced ...

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