Let Me Hear Your Body Talk

This paper describes a research project created to investigate the application of theatre devising strategies to create a heightened awareness of non-verbal language and embodied experience of words in Additional Language (AL) learning and teaching where there tends to be a lack in understanding of the importance and the potential of the body’s involvement in the process. Four workshops in Basel, Switzerland were designed and facilitated with adults from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds as part of my post-graduate doctoral research. I use data generated by an ethnographic approach to fieldwork – analysing interviews, written responses, both participants’ and my own, in the project blog, and observations of responses from participants during the workshops. I discuss the theatrical activities used for this purpose reflecting on the possible effects on participants’ linguistic ability and awareness of their physicality as part of an ongoing research process. I draw on Bourdieu’s notion of linguistic habitus and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body experiencing the world to provide a theoretical framework for analysing the processes of these workshops, and to support the development of a theatre practice to support AL learning that I am tentatively calling ‘experiencing the word’ or ‘experience of the word’. I propose that this approach, paying particular attention to learning through the body and language learning as an embodied experience, better provides the pragmatic and social conditions, re-created and rehearsed through drama, needed in learning a foreign language.