With the high numbers of English learners (ELs) in school and rising demands for students to become proficient in academic forms of English, it is increasingly crucial for teachers to have effective, innovative tools to make content and language accessible to students. Adolescent ELs in particular are at a critical point in their educational careers, yet often underrepresented in scholarship. In this article, the author focuses on findings on academic language instruction derived from a yearlong ethnographic study of a middle school class for newcomers taught using drama‐based techniques. The findings illustrate how this kind of work can engender communication and linguistic risk taking among ELs. Concepts from Bakhtin's (1981) analysis of language and power, along with the notion of embodied learning, serve as guiding ideas in examining the data. The qualitative data reveal both the problems of reductive approaches to teaching academic language and the efficacy and power of multimodal, embodied pedagogies wherein students are able to both learn critical forms of language and make them personally relevant.