This article summarizes the processes and findings of a 2-year collaborative action research (CAR) project that analyzed and aimed to counteract some of the most negative educational effects of English linguistic imperialism in the field of English language teaching (ELT) and, more concretely, in the context of English as a foreign language education in Spain. The CAR investigated the ramifications of this phenomenon in a primary school located in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city of Val encia. The pedagogical alternative it embraced in order to reverse the underlying tenets of ELT under present-day neoliberal imperialism consisted in combining art and multimodality through a series of projects; a variety of qualitative strategies were used (classroom observation, journal entries, recordings, student interviews, photographs, etc.) to assess its effects. Evidence showed that the three projects developed during the CAR succeeded in offering a worthwhile educational experience and hence a valuable critical alternative to mainstream ELT, one that brought about a change in the way the socially underprivileged students related to the English language.

This article analyzes the processes and findings of a collaborative action research (CAR) project that aimed to analyze the potential of materiality to radically transform the way English was taught and learned in an underprivileged public school in Spain. The CAR drew on new materialisms and new literacy studies to explore the relationship between matter and English language teaching from socioeconomic, sociocultural, and technological perspectives. The main pedagogical strategy consisted of widening the quantity and quality of the material resources in the English classroom, precisely to draw a material link between the English classroom and the students’ homes, communities, and the informal literacies they enacted in them. Through two cycles of inquiry, the CAR team put into practice two multimodal and artifactual workshops with a group of nine children from underprivileged, minority backgrounds. A variety of qualitative strategies were used (including classroom recordings, student interviews, and photographs) to confirm that the insights from new materialisms and new literacy studies had generated opportunities for meaningful English learning within a culturally sustaining pedagogy.