Apples - Journal of Applied Language Studies

Embodied language learning through engagement in the arts

Sofia Jusslin — 2025-03-31

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What’s art got to do with it?

Eeva Anttila — 2025-03-31

This article focuses on the meaning of art in embodied language learning. It tackles questions about how art works, what art is good for or—as the heading states— What's art got to do with it? The connection between language and embodiment has been established, and the role of art in enhancing learning in various ways has been discussed widely. While this article acknowledges the claims on the educational power of art in existing literature, the guiding question of how art works—especially in educational situations related to language learning—is deliberately open regarding assessable (language) learning outcomes. The article begins by discussing the author’s methodological approach that draws from the notions of sense, sensing, and seeing. This discussion is followed by sections on language, including (trans)languaging, art, and arts education. The author then moves towards practice and, within it, the notion of ‘glowing’ moments, in which she leans on her earlier work related to ‘physical expressive space’ and the methodological approach and theoretical concepts presented earlier. She takes a closer look at a videotaped excerpt from an art pedagogical project, in which she attends to its material, sensory, and affective elements. Through this inquiry, the author proposes that the notion of (trans)languaging is pivotal to understanding and articulating how art works in educational situations related to language learning and beyond. In closing the article, the author asserts that artistic practice is (trans)languaging and further, that arts education is language education.

“Wild” languaging

Kaisa Korpinen — 2025-03-31

A growing body of research has illustrated that embodied and arts-based approaches can holistically support additional language learning. However, more research on the implementation of such approaches is needed to impact pedagogical practices. This study explores how integrating language and dance can create possibilities for embodied language learning in early additional language education. It is based on a project that combined dance with early Swedish language learning in a Finnish primary school. The analytical focus is on animal-themed language and dance integrated activities held when the participating pupils were in second grade. The study draws theoretically on socio-material approaches to language education, which involves considering languaging an activity that engages the entire human being and relates them to other people, materials, and spaces. The data include video recordings of lessons, lesson plans, and the researcher’s embodied experiences and written reflections. An arts-based and post-qualitative research approach is used to analyse and present languaging events. The results indicate that children were activated in languaging through communicative movement exploration that involved children transforming into or becoming animals. The languaging unfolded in unpredictable or “wild” ways in activities that involved repetition, variation, and sense-making with creative movement and sound. Children’s agency in languaging was performed collectively in relation to bodies and materialities of the space in an embodied and creative activity involving peer collaboration and performing. To conclude, the study proposes “wild” languaging as a practice of embodied language learning through dance, and discusses its pedagogical potential for early additional language education.

The frictions and blessings of doing community arts in schools with multilingual pupils

Riina Hannuksela — 2025-03-31

Ethical reflections are integral to community art, which aims for equitable encounters and collaboration. However, the reality in which many community art projects are conducted creates friction with this aim. The asymmetrical positions of artists and participants and the sometimes limited possibilities for participants to regulate their participation, especially in formal education settings, pose challenges that must be addressed. This article analyses ethical challenges in facilitating community arts projects in primary schools. Data was collected from two projects with multilingual preparatory-class pupils led by two dance and community artists in collaboration with a class teacher. The projects aimed to engage pupils in artistic processes and facilitate Finnish-language learning through participation in artistic activities. Using autoethnographic methods and thematic analysis, we examined the ethically important moments reflected in our work diaries. These often unpredictable and fleeting everyday moments are seemingly unrelated to ethics; however, they have the potential for ethical concerns as they entail the possibility of wrongdoing. We explore critical ethical considerations and possibilities in artistic processes within educational contexts, aiming to offer new insights into the factors influencing such processes.

Å tenke med Polanyis kunst- og kunnskapsfilosofi

Elin Aaness — 2025-03-31

Taking the Hungarian scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi’s theoretical framework as a point of departure, this article investigates how the language promoting and developing potential of metaphors may be utilized in classroom teaching. Polanyi sees the metaphorical expressions in poetry and art, and in general the imagination’s ability to synthesize the otherwise ambiguous and chaotic elements of life, as equally valid modes of knowledge as those of science. His most important discovery is the structure of tacit knowing. This structure is described as a “from-to knowing”. By this Polanyi means that what we have in focal awareness, as in a metaphorical expression or an artwork, always bears upon something we are “only” subsidiarily aware of, as for example the tacit understanding of the semiotics, bodily sensations, life-world experiences or historical and theoretical facts. This article investigates three aspects of “from-to knowing” as embodied in art: the functional, the phenomenal and the semantic. The ontological aspect is inferred from these three. Through empirical studies of how teachers and senior college students in upper secondary Nordic classrooms attribute values to metaphors and artworks, the article investigates how the concepts of Polanyi reveal the language learning potential specifically of literature, in “real” teaching and learning contexts. Polanyi´s viewpoints on intentionality, “being in the world” and embodiment intersect with views expressed by other phenomenologists. However, we find that Polanyi´s unique contribution to phenomenology in general, and literature education specifically, is that it gives profound insights into the structure of intentionality that is particularly helpful in making us understand the complexity of levels at work in literature.

Language learners’ drawings and textual commentaries as a way to envision goals and aspirations for future language use

Anu Muhonen — 2025-03-31

Written and spoken language are not the only ways to illustrate thinking. Incorporating arts-informed and multimodal ways to communicate can offer new insights for higher education language teaching and learning practices. This study investigates how Finnish as a second language students’ drawings as visualizations support an arts-informed approach to knowledge production in the initial years of language learning and proficiency in higher education in Canada. Further, it explores how students of Finnish represent their aspirations and objectives for their future language use and study through these embodied visualizations. The article focuses on how students visualize their aspirations to learn and use language without having to look for support from English. Grounded in reflective arts-informed language pedagogy, this study employs multisemiotic content analysis to examine a selection of students’ drawings. Through drawing, students visualize their imagined potential selves as future language users in different situations, activities and tasks and with different people. While language learners traditionally express their thoughts through oral and written language, and commonly in English, this study shows that drawings offer an alternative and artistic avenue for knowledge transmission and communication in the early stages of the language learning trajectory. Through reflective research practice, his study also addresses some implications of integrating arts-informed teaching and learning practice into second language pedagogy, encouraging instructors to adapt arts-informed teaching methodologies to align with students’ individual learning trajectories.

Embodied and arts-integrated languages and literacies education in primary teacher education

Sofia Jusslin — 2025-03-31

Embodied learning and arts integration have recently gained more attention in research on languages and literacies education. Researchers have stressed that teacher education can act as a catalyst for bringing new perspectives on teaching languages and literacies to school practices. This study builds on a workshop series about embodied and arts-integrated languages and literacies education implemented in primary teacher education in Finland. Engaging with posthumanist and rhizomatic theories, the study explored becoming-teachers’ diffractions of opportunities and challenges in using embodied and arts-integrated teaching approaches in languages and literacies education. The study was methodologically conducted as arts-based research, specifically by creating poems with data as an analytical approach. The opportunities and challenges created friction between each other and became intertwined as opportunities-and-challenges. As such, the becoming-teachers recognized their value and adopted a critical perspective on the teaching approaches. Illustrated with four poems, the analysis indicates that the becoming-teachers’ engagement with these approaches set in motion thoughts about opportunities-and-challenges concerning (un)learning conceptions of teaching and learning languages and literacies; balancing pedagogical acts and realities; the friction of differentiating the teaching; and a mixture of (un)certainties regarding future teaching practices. In conclusion, implications for languages and literacies education, as well as teacher education, are discussed.

Teachers’ expanding roles and tasks

Mariana Siljamäki — 2025-03-31

Developing linguistically and culturally aware pedagogies is essential in increasingly diverse countries, such as Finland, thus needing more attention in teachers’ preservice education. This article focuses on physical education (PE) students’ views on their future profession and how these views may expand toward cultural and linguistic awareness. In addition, it explores how Finnish as a second language (F2L) teachers view their roles and tasks and how they apply embodied and arts-based pedagogies in their language classes. The notion of expanding professionalism is a central concept in this study. It entails attending to teachers’ social responsibilities. In addition, the theoretical framework includes a discussion of embodied pedagogy and language as a multimodal phenomenon. The context is a mandatory equality course in a PE teacher program at a Finnish university. The course included fieldwork where the PE students practiced embodied and arts-based language pedagogies. Drawing mainly from approaches to performative writing, the authors approach the research material and present their findings in narrative form. Based on the study, both PE students and F2L teachers appear to be aware of the need to expand their professional competences and consider embodied and arts-based approaches to be important in teaching language. However, future teachers need courage and skill in embodied and multimodal pedagogies.

Moreover, they expressed an awareness of teachers’ social responsibilities within the increasingly complex societal situation. The authors conclude that embodied and arts-based approaches are key to developing culturally and linguistically aware PE. Such approaches have great potential for educating all future teachers.

From intra-action to intratwining?

Johanna Lehtinen-Schnabel — 2025-03-31

In this article, we argue that transdisciplinary research and pedagogical practice on music and language learning should find new conceptual and practical approaches to examine the different ways of integrating music and language education. We aim to strengthen transdisciplinary research and practice related to language learning as an embodied activity in and through music education by focusing on the notion of intra-action, which is seen as a central notion of new materialist theories related to the rapidly growing field of embodied language learning. Conceptually, we contest the ways music and language learning have been understood in pertinent research, which often stems from mere multidisciplinary thinking instead of a deeply transdisciplinary ethos. Dismantling the boundaries between the disciplines of music education and applied linguistics in an embodied language learning context towards transdisciplinary thinking, we introduce intratwining as an example of transdisciplinary theorisation (coordinating the notions of intra-action and intertwining). In addition, we call attention to the use of music-integrated language learning, which could also be approached from the perspective of language-integrated music learning, on which this study grounds its transdisciplinary lens.