Maria Rydell, Stockholm University

In this talk I present an ongoing research project on L2 instruction for newly arrived migrant students enrolled in the Swedish Language Introduction program (LI). LI is designed for students aged 16–19 who need to acquire Swedish. Over the course of an academic year, we conducted a video ethnography with a class of migrant students, many of whom have refugee backgrounds and limited prior schooling. Our methodological approach combines linguistic ethnography with multimodal interaction analysis (e.g., Copland & Creese, 2015; Mondada, 2018). The dataset includes 50 hours of video-recorded classroom interactions, complemented by fieldnotes, photographs, interviews, and observations collected during the students’ visits to dance and theatre performances and art exhibitions.
 

Performative teaching (Piazzoli & Dalziel 2024) combines art-based expressions (dance, music, theatre, literature etc.) with second language instruction. In the talk, I explore the kinds of learning opportunities performative teaching affords and how different embodied and spatial configurations construct different linguistic spaces within the classroom. Ultimately, the presentation addresses whether a multimodal and interactional perspective can offer new insights into how low literate migrant students’ language use and language development can be understood. 

Read more on the research project