Ensayando las palabras: el papel de la imaginación, la creatividad y el juego en el aprendizaje de idiomas

Abstract

This paper focuses on the need to return creativity, improvisation, imagination and embodied learning to today’s bilingual, multicultural classrooms. It presses for the need to let students explore language, to try on the words in different contexts, to use language to interact with others, to make mistakes in a safe environment and to try on the culture without being overly stigmatized or traumatized. By discussing illustrative exercises that can be used in many types of multilingual classroom, the authors explore how, by actually experiencing learning, as part of an engaging and immersive curriculum, it sinks into the bones of learner, and is more easily recalled. ‘Whole body’ engagement, learning by doing and experiencing, as children do in early childhood, as opposed to an over-emphasis on abstract cognition, recognizes that human experience helps the foreign language learning process.