This doctoral dissertation explores how the integration of language and dance can be practiced and conceptualised as an embodied approach in early additional language education, addressing the urgent need for new pedagogical practices in teaching additional languages to children. Theoretically, the dissertation is grounded in embodied learning, a holistic conception that involves learners’ active engagement with their social and material environments. It also draws on sociomaterial approaches to understand language learning as an embodied, material, and relational process, with teaching as an emergent, unpredictable practice.

Methodologically, the dissertation moved from educational design research towards arts-based and post-qualitative research. A multiprofessional team, including the researcher and dance and class teachers, co-designed activities that integrated creative dance in the early teaching of Swedish as an additional language at a Finnish-speaking primary school. An entire grade participated in these project lessons as part of their Swedish language curriculum in grades 1–2. Data assemblages included video recordings of lessons, audio recordings of team meetings, lesson designs, and embodied experiences and written reflections of team members. Arts-based and post-qualitative approaches were used to draw on multiple forms of knowing and expression, both in analysing the data and presenting the results.

The dissertation comprises three empirical articles and an overarching summary. Article I explores the collaboration within the multiprofessional team as they integrated dance into early language education, showing that co-designing language-and-dance-integrated pedagogical practices happened in events that crossed subject boundaries, during which the team members became an assembled team. Article II focuses on the team’s experiences of integrating language and dance during in-person instruction during the Covid-19 pandemic, revealing that this integration allowed for alternative forms of communication and sustained dialogue, even when physical contact and shared materials were limited. Article III explores how language and dance integration created opportunities for embodied language learning, showing that language-and-dance-integrated activities activated children in ‘languaging’ and expanded their possibilities to act in the language-learning process.

Taken together, this dissertation shows that language and dance integration expands the embodied dimensions of language learning and teaching in early primary grades. Language and dance integration can create possibilities for embodied language learning through holistically engaging children, sparking their creativity, encouraging participation in diverse ways, and sustaining dialogue and communality. Moreover, the results highlight that multiprofessional, cross-sectoral collaboration can provide an entry point to embodied and arts-integrated pedagogies. The dissertation contributes both new pedagogical practices and a conceptualisation of language and dance integration as an embodied approach in early additional language education. More research on integrating language and dance is needed to establish these pedagogical practices and advance language education.