Kokemuksen keholliset esitykset

Abstract

The term social circus refers to pedagogical circus activities that are used to foster collaboration and interaction between the participants. This paper is based on a research project that aimed to analyze how the embodied nature of social circus activities is related to second language use and learning. The participants are adult second language speakers of Finnish with emerging literacy, and the data has been gathered with the methods of video-ethnography and analyzed using multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada 2014). The focus of analysis on the participants’ turns that combine the grammatical resources of Finnish with embodied means. These turns occur as part of a reflective activity during which the participants share their thoughts on the circus activities. The analysis shows how the collaborative nature of the circus activities is reflected in language use and highlights the embodied nature of language use and learning.