LESSON 4 - Explore

Wesleyan University – Philippines
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija
MASTER OF EDUCATION IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION
Lecture Note for

Principles, Strategies, and Practices in Literature Teaching
Prepared by
FERDINAND BULUSAN, PhD

Course Facilitator
LESSON 4 : Multisensory Literature Teaching
Humans learn through experience, and creating experiences needs the use of senses. This concept
has been the basis of teaching literacy, especially among elementary graders. With this framework,
multisensory teaching has emerged and later widely used by language teachers, including literature
instructors. An engaging teaching approach, multisensory teaching banks on the power of using combined
senses (sight, hearing, movement, and touch) to create meaningful learning. Recent approaches in
elementary literacy prove that multisensory teaching does not only engage children to learn but also create
a strong relationship with experience and concept. In other words, multisensory teaching provides kids
more than one way to connect with what they are learning. It also helps in recalling key information about
the literary piece. Researchers on literacy improvement believe that involving multiple areas of the brain is
one of the prime ways to teach concepts. This is called whole-brain learning.
Multisensory teaching is anchored on the whole based learning. In other words, wholebrain learning
posits that we remember how to do things best when the directions are given with engagement of the
multiple senses. Moreover, multisensory teaching can be combined with the theory of multiple intelligences
by Howard Gardner. By using multisensory literature teaching, the learners can have the opportunity to
seek the learning style that best fits them.
Almost everyone can benefit from using multisensory teaching. However, researches have
emphasized that it benefits most those learners with learning disabilities, with sensory integration
challenges, and in early elementary grades. In fact, literacy, in particular, is a multisensory skill because of
the need to decode words and comprehend the thought at the same time.
Readers at risk can be aided with multisensory learning because they are forced to use all of their
senses while browsing a text and rely on their critical thinking. Moreover, multisensory teaching can be
used during actual teaching or remedial instruction. For instance, a children’s literature teacher would like
to emphasize how spiders move; he/she would use the poem “A Little Spider.” All spider words would be
replaced by touching both thumbs and crisscrossing with both index fingers. You can develop learners’
literacy by including some components like auditory and visual activities. Using multisensory activities for
advanced elementary grades can develop critical thinking and higher level of reading comprehension. One
technique that you can use includes taking turns in reading a poem with some critical thinking questions or
photographs in between. In this way, you can ignite the students’ multiple senses.
One emerging modification of multisensory teaching is multisensory storytelling (Preece & Zhao,
2015). While narrating, the literature teacher will aid his/her storytelling by the use of relevant objects,
chosen for their sensory qualities (e.g., feel, smell, temperature, height). These objects will give more appeal
to the literary texts and provide a stronger relevance of the text to the learners.
A very popular technique in the use of multisensory teaching to enhance reading comprehension is
using story sticks. These colored popsicle sticks will represent each element of the children’s short story.
Blue sticks, for example, may refer to the characters in the story. The green stick may refer to the setting.
The learners can exchange the sticks and listen to one another while they answer the questions. Also, the
kids can also be given activities to color or highlight the major elements of the story. The following are
some techniques you can employ in using multisensory teaching:
1. Try playing an audio recording or watching a video clip of the narrator while reading a literary
piece as a class.
2. As a way to enhance kinesthetic skills, let the learners build vocabulary words using letter magnets.
3. Give students video or audiobook assignments to take home instead of pure print books.
4. Provide children opportunities to draw the meaning of words that they have difficulty to understand
in the text.
5. Teach students to sound out words while pointing at each letter to solidify a link between sounds
and print letters.

LESSON 4 - Explore

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

LESSON 4 - Explore

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

LESSON 4 - Explore

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Wesleyan University – Philippines

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

MASTER OF EDUCATION IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION

Lecture Note for

FERDINAND BULUSAN, PhD

LESSON 4 : Multisensory Literature Teaching

You might also like