A ‘push’ by any other name: linguistic embodiment in EAL and Michael Chekhov’s psychological gesture

Repeated calls to undo ‘the racist and colonial dynamics of our classrooms’ have signalled the need to address the sociological inequities and psychological ‘barriers’ of students who speak English as an Additional Language (EAL) in the classroom. While recent work has drawn attention to linguistic and cultural factors, I contend that it is equally important to consider how cognitive issues in additional language processing create unique somatic challenges for student actors in ways more profound than psychology, pronunciation, or comprehension alone. This article describes how additional language embodiment may affect EAL speaker’s physical expression of English-language text, and discusses the merits of movement-based pedagogies (such as Michael Chekhov’s Psychological Gesture) to enhance textual embodiment. By juxtaposing phenomenological accounts with discoveries from embodied neurocognition, I propose that priming the gesture in a student’s native language(s) conscripts more ingrained resources that can expedite pedagogical goals, while demonstrating sensitivity for ‘affective linguistic conditioning’. Finally, utilising theories of language and the predictive brain, I share findings from workshops with a group of multilingual Chekhov instructors, speculating that fluency in an additional language might contribute to the granularization of Action Concepts, expanding the performer’s range and choice of embodied realisation.