This paper focuses on social inclusion and the role of shepherding touch in primary school. We have set out to find what is the role played by shepherding touch in the interactional exchanges of a multilingual classroom and whether the shepherding touch is a means of advancing social inclusion.  In social interaction, touch has been seen to serve prosocial purposes such as displaying comfort and affection as well as a means for social control (Cekaite 2016; Cekaite & Holm Kvist 2017; Goodwin 2017). 

By shepherding touch we refer to embodied, haptic practices – or body techniques – that are used for steering purposes These touches are reported to occur especially in interaction with infants and younger children in a variety of daycare and family settings where both tactile and verbal steering are resources for control and management of a child’s action (Cekaite 2010; Goodwin & Cekaite 2013). In concrete, shepherding may take the form of a (gentle) body-twist or push where a care-giver terminates the child’s prior activity and reorients him/her perceptually to a relevant content or process in the surroundings. The shepherding touch is usually accompanied with talk addressed to the touched person. The notion of shepherding touch derives from the study of haptic sociality (Goodwin 2017) within the multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada 2014).

The presentation shifts focus from nurseries and kindergarten to primary school: we will explore the use of shepherding touch in a preparatory class in Finland. This form of basic education brings together newly immigrated children with diverse linguistic backgrounds, who study in a pull-out preparatory classroom usually for one school year, and get intensive instruction in Finnish as a second/additional language. In preparatory education, language instruction is integrated to content learning in order to prepare the child to transfer to basic education. The goal of this form of education is to provide immigrant children with the skills and competences required in a regular instruction.  

For the purposes of this paper, we understand inclusion as a process of increasing participation in learning and social encounters. Inclusion is a concept widely used in rhetorics concerning justice of education. For the purpose of this paper, we understand inclusion as a process of increasing participation in learning and social encounters. In micro-level observation of a multilingual classroom, the events of tactile steering are viewed as indexes for social inclusion.

Many decades the focus of second language learning has primarily focused on  individual’s linguistic competences (e.g. Ellis 2008), and crosslinguistic influence between L1 and L2 (Cook 2003). In addition, the research has been dominated by English-as-second language (TESL) and by a situationally monolingual ideals of language use (García 2009).  From the 1990’s, the focus has been turning towards the role of social interaction in language development (van Lier 1994; Lantolf 1996; Firth and Wagner 1997). Currently, the field is going through a “multilingual turn” (May 2014), as the focus is shifted to the interplay of languages in multilingual users’ translanguaging practices and the functions of semiotic resources other than words in developing communicative competence (Kramsch 2006). We need more research into how additional/second language learners make use of the social, material and embodied context in which they are lodged, how they become agents in that environment and how their communicative competence develops. While there is more research in this line on adult second language learning (Eskildsen & Wagner 2018), we wish to contribute to the knowledge of child second language development from a social and contextual point of view.

The paper applies multimodal conversation analytical method (e.g. Mondada 2014) to a multilingual classroom situation for newly arrived immigrant children. Multimodal conversation analysis has been proved to be a fruitful method in studying language learning in interaction (e.g. Kasper & Wagner 2011). The data for the study derive from the corpus LongSecond restored in the Language Bank of Finland. These data were recoded longitudinally during an academic year in a Finnish primary school that provides preparatory education for newly arrived immigrant children (N=6–9). The focus class was video documented from September to May twice a week making up altogether 46 hours of video recorded lessons. Every other lesson represents more traditional teacher-lead teaching and learning on content and language in plenary formation; every second lesson represents hands-on tasks in teacher-monitored peer groups around a table. In addition to the video recordings, background information on age, earlier schooling and language history was collected (if known). Most of the students were Russian and Estonian speakers and thus represent the biggest immigrant groups in Finland. Many of the children were multilingual already when arriving to Finland. These resources may help them with the additional language development. Yet, in the early phase they have very limited verbal access to the new language. In addition to the language learners, there were always two adults present in the class: a teacher (either a class teacher or a Finnish language teacher) and a teaching assistant whose responsibilities varied from assistance with academic content or class management. Below we will refer to both teachers and teaching assistants as teachers. The video recordings were transcribed with Elan (Wittenburg et al. 2006) using Conversation analytical conventions. In these data, we firstly identified shepherding touches, and secondly, run an analysis of participation framework and sequential placement of shepherding touches. The analyses were warranted in datasessions held with the research group working in the project Touch in School.

The results show that the participation framework of shepherding touches is co-constructed by the teachers and students in a way where the teachers take the interactional roles of shepherds and the students align themselves as shepherdees. The participants do not challenge these participatory roles in the data. Sequentially, shepherding touch is recurrently found at points of lessons where a student has been distracted by some extra-curricular interest – be it another students’ initiative or something in the surroundings. By shepherding, the teachers are able to re-orient the student’s posture either towards a hands–on-task, or perceptually to something visible or hearable in the classroom and presented as a shared-point-of-reference. Shepherding touch allows the teachers the simultaneity of class management in an embodied action and continuity of the lesson agenda. From students’ point of view, shepherding touch advances learning since it is a means of re-including the student in the process of learning and participating in an educational encounter. The results show how learning a language and developing communicative competence are intertwined. Shepherding touch serves as a means for creating shared focus and helping language learners to interpret on-going activities when their linguistic competence is limited. Shepherding touch is also one of the devices that help to create space for learning when pupils are engaged in other activities than those of pedagogic interaction. In addition, shepherding touch serves as a means for comforting children when they display frustration during pedagogic interaction which can sometimes be difficult for them because of their limited competence of the language used for instruction. Shepherding touch can thus be seen as an effective pedagogic practice in multilingual classroom. As a conclusion, we wish to promote more research into the role of haptic sociality in classroom.

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