Here is an excerpt from the Enjoy TEFL Online TEFL Course:
When teaching a class, on many occasions you can use simple phrases to direct the learners: That’s right. That’s not right. Who’s next?
But you can also convey many instructions, requests, invitations and corrections by using various types of gestures and mime.
Using Gestures and mime for TEFL spark interest and encourage participation. So, in addition to your voice, you could use your hands, your eyes or, more frequently, a combination of both.
Such gestures and mime can be simple and effective and will encourage the students to speak, thereby reducing teacher talking time (TTT), and they will also save time.
Obviously the set of gestures and mime that you develop will have to be recognisable to the learners to avoid confusion, so they will need to learn them.
Gestures and mime can be used very effectively in teaching certain words. For example, the difference between ‘shy’ and ‘confident’ would be quite difficult to explain in simple language to a beginner class but could be demonstrated very simply in a few seconds with mime.
Students generally enjoy seeing their teacher acting out a word or miming an expression and it can add a sense of enjoyment to a class. If they laugh at your mime or gesture, all the better, because it will be more memorable!
Using gestures and mime is important when it comes to vocabulary. You can use them to elicit certain words and phrases.
If you teach very young students, it is also common to associate gestures with words to help students remember vocabulary better. Using the same gesture every time you say a particular word or phrase will help these students associate the two.
If you have just finished a section on feelings, make a list of feelings on the board and have students choose a slip of paper from a hat.
Each slip of paper should contain a sentence such as You are happy or sad or confused etc. Students should keep their sentences a secret.
Have one volunteer at a time mime the chosen sentence while the rest of the class tries to guess it.
To check individual comprehension, you can use the same basic idea but instead turn it into an interview activity where students have a sheet of paper with all the emotions listed as well as their secret emotion.
The idea is that students go around the classroom miming and guessing emotions in pairs and getting a student signature for each emotion.
When you go through the worksheet as a class, you can have students read aloud from their worksheets sentences like Jane is sad and ask Jane to mime being sad for the class.