Performative Language Learning with Refugees and Migrants: Embodied Research and Practice in the Sorgente Project

This book investigates the use of performative language pedagogy in working with refugees and migrants, exploring performative language teaching as the application of drama, music, dance and storytelling to second language acquisition.

Documenting a community-based project – funded by the Irish Research Council and conducted with three groups of refugees and migrants in Ireland and Italy – the book explores the methodological, pedagogical and ethical elements of performative language learning in the context of migration. Written by a team of arts-based researchers and practitioners, chapters discuss findings from the project that relate to factors such as embodied research methods, a motivation to belong and the ethical imagination, while exhibiting how performative language pedagogy can be effective in supporting children and adults in a range of challenging contexts.

Offering a poetic and pictorial representation of the Sorgente Project, this book will be of interest to postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the fields of English language arts and literacy education, drama in education, the sociology of education and second language acquisition more broadly. Those working in refugee and migrant studies, and teacher education studies will also find the volume of use.

Erika Piazzoli is Assistant Professor in Arts Education, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Fiona Dalziel is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation, University of Padova, Italy.