Early foreign-language exposure in preschool is usually justified by developmental plasticity, rich sensorimotor learning, and the motivational value of playful classroom routines. At the same time, young children do not learn effectively through decontextualized verbal explanation alone. They benefit from concrete, meaningful, and socially mediated experiences in which words are linked to actions, objects, and events. This makes movement-based language teaching particularly relevant in early childhood education.

The theoretical background for this line of work is commonly discussed under the rubric of embodied cognition or embodied learning. In this perspective, language learning is not treated as a purely abstract symbolic process; sensorimotor activity can contribute to the encoding, retrieval, and stabilization of verbal memory traces. Recent syntheses in language education and embodied learning have reinforced this point, while also showing that the effects of movement are not uniform. Interventions tend to work better when the movement is highly relevant to the academic content and tightly integrated with the learning task rather than merely added as a break or motivational device (Jusslin et al., 2022; Mavilidi et al., 2022; Macedonia, 2025; Liu et al., 2025).

Within foreign-language pedagogy, Total Physical Response (TPR) remains the most recognizable movement-based approach. Originally proposed by Asher (1969), TPR uses teacher commands and physical responses to connect comprehension, action, and meaning. In practice, however, preschool movement-based language teaching is broader than classical TPR. The literature includes gesture-enriched vocabulary instruction, whole-body enactment of word meaning, active-learning lessons in which physical activity is embedded into language content, and descriptive classroom studies explicitly framed as TPR. Treating all of these approaches as equivalent risks obscures important methodological and conceptual differences.

From a developmental perspective, this framework is particularly pertinent to preschool education. Young children typically learn through action, imitation, repetition, and socially shared routines; they rarely encounter new language as an isolated verbal code. When words are paired with gestures, actions, spatial movement, objects, and playful interaction, children receive multiple cues that can support attention and meaning-making simultaneously. A recent mixed-methods review of embodied language learning argued that bodily involvement may facilitate learning by linking meaning, action, emotion, and attention within a single instructional episode (Jusslin et al., 2022). Macedonia (2025) similarly emphasizes that sensorimotor participation can create richer multimodal memory traces that strengthen later recall. Seen in this light, movement-based language teaching is not simply a motivational embellishment; it may change how linguistic information is encoded in memory.

Embodied approaches can also be interpreted through cognitive load theory. From this perspective, movement may support learning when it simplifies the mapping between a new word and its referent, guides attention toward task-relevant information, and increases germane processing without imposing unnecessary extraneous load (Sweller et al., 2019). This distinction is especially important in preschool settings, where attentional and working-memory resources are limited and where overly complex activities may become distracting rather than helpful. Consistent with this reasoning, Mavilidi et al. (2022) proposed a taxonomy based on the relevance of the movement to the learning content and the degree to which the movement is integrated into the academic task. This framework helps explain why preschool studies may produce mixed results when they group very different interventions under broad labels such as movement-based learning or TPR. Gesture-rich vocabulary enactment, content-relevant whole-body activity, and generic movement breaks are not theoretically equivalent, even if all involve children moving.

In revising the paper, we therefore narrowed the evidence base to studies that directly addressed preschool movement-based foreign-language learning or closely related novel-language tasks, and we used broader embodied-learning literature only to interpret the findings rather than to inflate the primary evidence base.

This review aims to evaluate empirical evidence on the role of motor activity in preschool foreign-language learning, with particular attention to movement-based vocabulary instruction and TPR-related interventions. Two questions guided the review:

What evidence is available that movement-based interventions improve preschool children’s foreign-language vocabulary learning or related verbal-memory outcomes?

What can be concluded specifically about preschool TPR studies once study design and methodological quality are taken into account?

It is not movement per se that helps preschool foreign-language learning, but semantically relevant movement tightly integrated with the target content, delivered in an age-appropriate, playful format. This interpretation aligns with broader embodied-learning syntheses, which show that relevance and integration are central moderators of effect (Jusslin et al., 2022; Mavilidi et al., 2022). It is also compatible with the recent review by Macedonia (2025), which emphasizes sensorimotor engagement as a mechanism for strengthening long-term second-language vocabulary learning, and with the 2025 meta-analysis by Liu et al. (2025), which found that more active and more strongly embodied approaches tend to produce larger learning benefits.

The most convincing studies are those by Tellier (2008), Mavilidi et al. (2015), Toumpaniari et al. (2015), and Martin Martinez et al. (2025), all of which directly connect movement to language-learning performance in preschool samples.

Although the present review was intentionally restricted to preschool studies that directly assessed foreign-language or novel-language learning, the findings are more interpretable when placed alongside the broader Mavilidi program on integrated movement and learning. In non-language domains, follow-up preschool studies reported positive effects when movement was embedded directly into the academic content: integrated physical activities supported geography learning (Mavilidi et al., 2016), similar gains in learning and enjoyment were reported in a science lesson (Mavilidi et al., 2017), and numeracy research showed both immediate and delayed benefits when physical activity was tightly linked to the target task (Mavilidi et al., 2018). These studies were not included in the present synthesis because they do not directly address foreign-language outcomes. Nevertheless, they are theoretically informative because they point in the same direction as the language studies reviewed here: movement seems most educationally valuable when it carries representational meaning and forms part of the learning episode rather than being appended to it. The broader preschool literature therefore reinforces a cautious but coherent interpretation of the current evidence base.

The role of TPR should also be more carefully framed. TPR is pedagogically attractive in preschool because it reduces linguistic anxiety, supports participation, and turns comprehension into observable action. Therefore, the present review supports TPR primarily as a promising teaching approach rather than as a conclusively established evidence-based method based on preschool trials alone.

For practitioners, the present findings suggest that movement should not be treated as a generic classroom energizer detached from linguistic goals. More promising designs are those in which actions visibly represent the meaning of target words or support the retrieval of previously taught vocabulary. In preschool settings, this may involve acting out animals, classroom routines, spatial concepts, body-part commands, or everyday verbs. At the same time, the teacher introduces, repeats, and revisits the relevant language across sessions. Such practices are compatible with play-based pedagogy and may be particularly useful for children who benefit from active participation, reduced speaking pressure, and multimodal cues. At the same time, teachers should be cautious about excessive motor complexity, rapid pacing, or games whose connection to the lexical objective is weak, as these may dilute rather than strengthen the language-learning task. This also suggests a constructive role for collaboration between early childhood educators and physical education specialists, especially when active routines must fit real classroom constraints without losing linguistic focus. A useful planning question is therefore not simply “How can children move?” but “How does this movement help represent, reinforce, or retrieve the target language?”

A further implication concerns the type of language outcome studied. Most available evidence concerns concrete vocabulary and immediate or short-delay recall. Much less is known about broader language proficiency, morphosyntactic development, spontaneous oral production, or transfer over longer periods. The field would benefit from longer interventions, clearer outcome hierarchies, and preschool studies that compare different ways of embodying language rather than simply contrasting activity with inactivity.

Future research should distinguish more clearly between classical TPR, gesture-enriched instruction, and broader, integrated, movement-based interventions, as these labels are often used interchangeably despite involving distinct pedagogical mechanisms. Stronger preschool trials are needed with clearer reporting of dosage, teacher training, implementation fidelity, and delayed outcome assessment. It would also be valuable to compare receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, enjoyment, on-task behavior, and transfer outcomes within the same study, because these outcomes may not respond in the same way. Another priority is to test whether embodied instruction is differentially effective for action words, nouns, routines, and more abstract vocabulary. Such refinements help move the field beyond the broad claim that movement helps learning toward a more specific account of when, why, and for whom movement-based foreign-language teaching is most effective.

Another issue concerns dosage and recurrence. Several preschool studies relied on brief interventions or relatively small sets of lexical items, making it difficult to infer how movement-based instruction functions within a broader language curriculum. In authentic preschool practice, learning usually depends on repeated exposure across routines, songs, transitions, stories, and play episodes rather than on a single isolated lesson. Future trials should therefore examine whether embodied language teaching remains effective when vocabulary is revisited across multiple classroom contexts, whether benefits generalize from receptive recognition to more spontaneous language use, and whether child characteristics such as baseline language ability, attentional control, or motor confidence moderate the effects. Answering these questions would help translate promising experimental findings into durable classroom practice. They would also clarify whether embodied methods are best used as a core instructional routine, a supplementary reinforcement strategy, or a bridge between language and movement curricula.

Movement-based instruction can support preschool foreign-language learning, especially when children physically enact the meaning of the target vocabulary or participate in active lessons in which movement is integral to the language task. The strongest evidence currently concerns vocabulary learning and related memory outcomes. TPR remains a valuable and engaging preschool pedagogy, but the quality of available TPR evidence remains uneven. Future research should prioritize larger preschool trials, longer follow-up periods, and outcome measures that extend beyond immediate vocabulary recall.

The author gratefully acknowledges their supervisor's guidance and valuable feedback throughout this study. Appreciation is also extended to the school management and parents of students at Citungku Elementary School for their cooperation and permission to conduct the research. The author further thanks colleagues who assisted with data collection and all parties who contributed to the completion of this work.

All data used in this study were obtained from previously published studies identified through systematic database searches. The list of included articles and relevant extracted data is available within the manuscript.

No external financial support was received for the conduct of this research.

The author declares no conflict of interest.