Embodying Language In Action

This book explores embodiment in second language education, sociocultural theory and research. It focuses on process drama, an embodied approach that engages learners’ imagination, body and voice to create a felt-experience of the second language and culture. Divided into three parts, it begins by examining the aesthetic and intercultural dimension of performative language teaching, the elements of drama and knowing-in-action. The central part of the book examines issues related to play, emotions, classroom discourse and assessment when learning a language through process drama, in a sociocultural perspective. The third part is an analysis of the author’s qualitative research, which informs a subtle discussion on reflective practitioner methodology, learner engagement and teacher artistry. Each chapter includes a drama workshop, illustrating in practice what embodying language in action can look like when working with asylum seekers, adult learners with intellectual disabilities, pre-service teachers, international students and children involved in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programme. A unique combination of theory, research and reflective practice, this book provides valuable insights for teacher/artists, teacher educators and researchers in the fields of performative and sociocultural language learning.

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact.

The first edition of this work became a standard reference work in the general context of humanistic approaches to foreign language teaching and learning. This new edition gives a brief overview of further developments in relevant fields and discusses the importance of the concept of teaching as an art in light of the increasing standardization and digitalization of education. Reviews of the 1st edition I believe that the book will become a standard reference point for all those who, against the current tide of 'scientific', objectives-based, test-oriented, control-obsessed, sterile approaches to language teaching, continue to believe that language teaching is indeed an art, and a joyful art at that. Prof. Dr. Alan Maley in English Language Teaching Journal Peter Lutzker is a major educational thinker and has spent half an earthly span living towards this major book. (...) I have placed Peter's book on my shelves next to those of Rogers, Curran, Dufeu and Stevick. Mario Rinvolucri in Humanising Language Teaching

This book introduces the application of drama and arts-related activities to the teaching of English as a second or additional language in early education. Joe Winston draws on both his own scholarly expertise and experience as a practitioner to provide a theoretical rationale, practical examples, tips and easy-to-read teaching guides intended to help busy professionals apply drama related methods in an efficient and accessible way. Detailed examples of schemes of work are included for all year groups and developmental stages between the ages of 3 and 7 years of age. Each scheme centres on a popular and easily obtainable picturebook or children's story. Detailed guidance on how to plan and structure lessons with specific learning objectives is offered, as is extensive advice on issues of classroom management. The practical approaches have been used successfully in early years settings in China and primary and pre-primary settings in the UK, and are adaptable to a variety of national and cultural contexts.

Language Learning and Intercultural Understanding in the Primary School shows how to deliver a progressive and holistic embedded language curriculum. It provides guidance on inclusive approaches for students with English as an additional language, including native speakers in the target language as well as language awareness activities that maximise links with learning in English. Practical and accessible, it contains classroom examples, plans, resources and pedagogical approaches all underpinned by theory, research and practice. Each chapter examines specific themes relating to language, culture, identity and wellbeing, providing rich discussions and a range of perspectives. Case studies ‘bring to life’ the examples provided, and reflection points offer the reader the opportunity to pause and consider an idea, resource, or challenging concept before moving on. Presenting a lived narrative of shared voices, the authors invite readers to learn about their own cultural and linguistic identities and how these relate to their practice. This is a must-read for teachers, language specialists and school leaders who wish for a clear rationale for the role of language, culture, identity and wellbeing within and beyond the curriculum.

The Routledge Companion to Drama in Education is a comprehensive reference guide to this unique performance discipline, focusing on its process-oriented theatrical techniques, engagement of a broad spectrum of learners, its historical roots as a field of inquiry and its transdisciplinary pedagogical practices. The book approaches drama in education (DE) from a wide range of perspectives, from leading scholars to teaching artists and school educators who specialise in DE teaching. It presents the central disciplinary conversations around key issues, including best practice in DE, aesthetics and artistry in teaching, the histories of DE, ideologies in drama and education, and concerns around access, inclusivity and justice. Including reflections, lesson plans, programme designs, case studies and provocations from scholars, educators and community arts workers, this is the most robust and comprehensive resource for those interested in DE’s past, present and future.

This engaging and complete resource has everything you need to bring drama and theatre techniques into the ESL, EFL, or World Language Classroom. Are your students reluctant to speak out in class? Do they lack confidence in their language skills? The dynamic drama games in this book are the perfect catalyst to transform your students into engaged learners, and help them build confidence and language skills. The interactive theatre games and techniques are specifically designed for use in Second, Foreign, and World Language classrooms to empower students through meaningful, agentive language learning. With over 80 activities and games, and hundreds of extensions that can be catered to every level, this book provides teachers with clear, step-by-step instructions to teaching dramatic activities with L2 learners of all levels and backgrounds. The games and strategies in this book will enliven classrooms with communication that is creative, memorable, inspiring, and fun. Grounded in cutting-edge research, this book explains why teaching language through drama is effective and inspiring for teachers and students alike, directing readers to a wide array of resources and approaches to teaching language through theatre. You’ll also find guidance on leading drama games with language learners in a variety of online platforms, lesson planning models, and an example lesson plan for easy implementation in physical or virtual classroom spaces.

This book provides an in-depth look on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Early Childhood Education (ECE), two domains where major joint research is needed. By taking stock on theoretical underpinnings, it explores the ideal conditions for early additional language acquisition in preschool contexts through CLIL with a learner-centered approach grounded in developmentally appropriate practices (DEP) and an emphasis on the importance of play, cognition, holistic content adaptation and social-emotional learning. The book also offers a comprehensive view of how this methodological approach has already set a clear path on Pre-primary education internationally. Finally, it offers insights into CLIL pedagogies as related and adapted to Pre-primary education, resources and materials for very young learners and practical implementation from the classroom. By providing a solid empirical background on Pre-primary CLIL, along with appropriate methodological issues and practices, this book serves as a key resource to students, practitioners, academics as well as teacher educators and policy-makers in international contexts.

An engaging book spanning the fields of drama, literary criticism, genre, and performance studies, Drama: Between Poetry and Performance teaches students how to read drama by exploring the threshold between text and performance. Draws on examples from major playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks Explores the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing Engages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance

In recent years, work surrounding theories of embodiment and the role of the putative mirror neuron system (MNS) in humans has gained considerable attention. If humans have developed a network of neurons that fire in response to other beings’ actions, as has been shown in macaques, this system could have vast implications for all kinds of cognitive processes unique to humans, such as language, learning, empathy and communication in general. The goal of tapping into and understanding such a system is a fascinating yet challenging one. One form of embodiment -- embodied linguistics -- suggests that the way we process linguistic information is linked to our physical experience of the concept conveyed by each word. The interaction between these cognitive systems (i.e., language and motor processing) may occur thanks to the firing of neurons making up the MNS. The possible interdependence between different cognitive systems has implications for healthy as well as pathological profiles, and in fact, work in recent years has also explored the role of ‘embodiment’ and/or the MNS in clinical populations such as stroke, Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Autism, among others. Research on embodiment and/or the MNS has been approached with a number of different methodologies, but the results obtained with these different methodologies have not been entirely consistent, generating doubts regarding the theories. The question has been raised as to what this line of inquiry can gain from the types of evidence contributed by functional neuroimaging methods carried out with healthy volunteers versus behavioral or lesion-symptom mapping methods employed with neurologically-compromised individuals. Of particular interest are the clinical applications of this line of research. If indeed a system exists which reflects a tight link between, for example, the human language and motor systems, then the obvious challenge is to tap into this system to create useful therapies that can provide rehabilitation where damage has occurred. This Research Topic brought together work conducted with healthy and patient populations using several behavioral and imaging techniques, as well as insightful commentaries and opinion pieces. We believe the combined work of the participating authors is an important contribution to this intriguing line of research and an excellent point of reference for future work.

A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language. Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first coherent, overarching theory that connects dynamical explanations of action and perception with language. Arguing from the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, they show that this continuity extends to language. Expanding and deepening enactive theory, they offer a constitutive account of language and the co-emergent phenomena of personhood, reflexivity, social normativity, and ideality. Language, they argue, is not something we add to a range of existing cognitive capacities but a new way of being embodied. Each of us is a linguistic body in a community of other linguistic bodies. The book describes three distinct yet entangled kinds of human embodiment, organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective; it traces the emergence of linguistic sensitivities and introduces the novel concept of linguistic bodies; and it explores the implications of living as linguistic bodies in perpetual becoming, applying the concept of linguistic bodies to questions of language acquisition, parenting, autism, grammar, symbol, narrative, and gesture, and to such ethical concerns as microaggression, institutional speech, and pedagogy.

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact.

This two-volume set provides a comprehensive overview of the multidisciplinary field of Embodied Cognition. With contributions from internationally acknowledged researchers from a variety of fields, Foundations of Embodied Cognition reveals how intelligent behaviour emerges from the interplay between brain, body and environment. Covering early research and emerging trends in embodied cognition, Volume 1 Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment is divided into four distinct parts, bringing together a number of influential perspectives and new ideas. Part one opens the volume with an overview of theoretical perspectives and the neural basis of embodiment, before part two considers body representation and its links with action. Part three examines how actions constrain perception of the environment, and part four explores how emotions can be shaped and structured by the body and its activity. Building on the idea that knowledge acquisition, retention and retrieval are intimately interconnected with sensory and motor processes, Foundations of Embodied Cognition is a landmark publication in the field. It will be of great interest to researchers and advanced students from across the cognitive sciences, including those specialising in psychology, neuroscience, intelligent systems and robotics, philosophy, linguistics and anthropology.

‘A focus on the body, its actions, and its cognitive mechanisms identifies ... foundational principles of activity that link the three elements of theatre; Story, Space, and Time. The three meet in, are defined by, and expressed through the actor’s body.’ – from the Introduction Embodied Acting is an essential, pragmatic intervention in the study of how recent discoveries within cognitive science can – and should – be applied to performance. For too long, a conceptual separation of mind and body has dominated actor training in the West. Cognitive science has shown this binary to be illusory, shattering the traditional boundaries between mind and body, reason and emotion, knowledge and imagination. This revolutionary new volume explores the impact that a more holistic approach to the "bodymind" can have on the acting process. Drawing on his experience as an actor, director and scholar, Rick Kemp interrogates the key cognitive activities involved in performance, including: non-verbal communication the relationship between thought, speech, and gesture the relationship between self and character empathy, imagination, and emotion. New perspectives on the work of Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, and Jacques Lecoq – as well as contemporary practitioners including Daniel Day-Lewis and Katie Mitchell – are explored through practical exercises and accessible explanations. Blending theory, practice, and cutting-edge neuroscience, Kemp presents a radical re-examination of the unconscious activities engaged in creating, and presenting, a role.

The way we make sense of emotional situations has long been considered a foundation for the construction of our emotional experiences. Sometimes emotional meanings become distorted and so do our emotional experiences become disturbed. In the last decades, an embodied construction of emotional meanings has emerged. In this book, the embodied simulation framework is introduced for distorted emotional and motivational appraisals such as irrational beliefs, focusing on hyper-reactive emotional and motivational neural embodied simulations as core processes of cognitive vulnerability to emotional disorders. By embodying distorted emotional cognition we can extend the traditional views of the development of distorted emotional appraisals beyond learning from stress-sensitization process. Conclusions for the conceptualization of distorted emotional appraisals and treatment implications are discussed. Distorted emotional cognitions such as rigid thinking (I should succeed), awfulizing (It’s awful) and low frustration tolerance (I can’t stand it) are both vulnerabilities to emotional disorders and targets of psychotherapy. In this book, I argue that distorted emotional cognitions which act as proximal vulnerability to emotional disorders are embodied in hyper-reactive neural states involved in dysregulated emotions. Traditionally, excessive negative knowledge has been considered the basis of the cognitive vulnerability to emotional disorders. I suggest that the differences in the affective embodiments of distorted cognition confer its vulnerability status, rather than the differences in dysfunctional knowledge. I propose that negative knowledge and stress-induced brain changes conflate each other in building cognitive vulnerability to disturbed emotion. This model of distorted emotional cognition suggests new integration of learning and medication interventions in psychotherapy. This book is an important contribution to the literature given that a new model for the conceptualization of cognitive vulnerability is presented which extends the way we integrate biological, behavioral, and memory interventions in cognitive restructuring. This work is part of a larger project on embodied clinical cognition.

Embodied cognition is one of the foremost areas of study and research in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics and debates in this exciting subject and essential reading for any student and scholar of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts: Historical underpinnings Perspectives on embodied cognition Applied embodied cognition: perception, language, and reasoning Applied embodied cognition: social and moral cognition and emotion Applied embodied cognition: memory, attention, and group cognition Meta-topics. The early chapters of the Handbook cover empirical and philosophical foundations of embodied cognition, focusing on Gibsonian and phenomenological approaches. Subsequent chapters cover additional, important themes common to work in embodied cognition, including embedded, extended and enactive cognition as well as chapters on empirical research in perception, language, reasoning, social and moral cognition, emotion, consciousness, memory, and learning and development.

Explores the development of nineteenth-century performance copyright laws which shape how we define and value drama and music.

Embodying Gender provides students and academics with a critical overview of body concepts in both sociology and in feminism. Previously, sociologists have attempted to gender the body and feminists have attempted to embody gender but Alexandra Howson's accessible new text draws these two literatures together, pointing to ways of integrating feminist perspectives on the body into sociological theory. Surveying all the key concepts in the field, this book introduces us to an extensive range of 'narratives of embodiment' and presents a full analysis of the most important texts in new feminist theories of the body. Key questions covered include: o What can sociology say about the body? o What impact has the body made on sociology? o What conceptual frameworks are used to address the body? How do these relate to issues of gender and embodied experience? o How do feminist conceptual tools sit within sociological analysis? Written in a clear, accessible style, Embodying Gender is an invaluable text for undergraduate students, postgraduates and academics in the fields of women's and gender studies and sociology, and is particularly relevant to those specialising in sociology of the body, feminist theory and social theory.

Working from a cultural studies perspective, author D. K. Smith here examines a broad range of medieval and Renaissance maps and literary texts to explore the effects of geography on Tudor-Stuart cultural perceptions. He argues that the literary representation of cartographically-related material from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century demonstrates a new strain, not just of geographical understanding, but of cartographic manipulation, which he terms, "the cartographic imagination." Rather than considering the effects of maps themselves on early modern epistemologies, Smith considers the effects of the activity of mapping-the new techniques, the new expectations of accuracy and precision which developed in the sixteenth century-on the ways people thought and wrote. Looking at works by Spenser, Marlowe, Raleigh, and Marvell among other authors, he analyzes how the growing ability to represent physical space accurately brought with it not just a wealth of new maps, but a new array of rhetorical techniques, metaphors, and associations which allowed the manipulation of texts and ideas in ways never before possible.

This edited volume seeks to integrate research and scholarship on the topic of embodiment, with the idea being that thinking and feeling are often grounded in more concrete representations related to perception and action. The book centers on psychological approaches to embodiment and includes chapters speaking to development as well as clinical issues, though a larger number focus on topics related to cognition and neuroscience as well as social and personality psychology. These topical chapters are linked to theory-based chapters centered on interoception, grounded cognition, conceptual metaphor, and the extended mind thesis. Further, a concluding section speaks to critical issues such as replication concerns, alternative interpretations, and future directions. The final result is a carefully conceived product that is a comprehensive and well-integrated volume on the psychology of embodiment. The primary audience for this book is academic psychologists from many different areas of psychology (e.g., social, developmental, cognitive, clinical). The secondary audience consists of disciplines in which ideas related to embodied cognition figure prominently, such as counseling, education, biology, and philosophy.