Language learning and teaching (LLT) materials—like teacher‐created handouts, textbooks, and overhead transparencies—are central elements of language classrooms worldwide. Nonetheless, how language students and teachers actually engage with and deploy LLT materials has rarely been the focus of research. In response, this issue offers the first compilation of classroom‐based studies of ‘materials use’ in language education and includes research on Ojibwe, Japanese, French, and English language pedagogy. In this introductory article to the special issue, we set the stage for the 7 empirical articles by offering much‐needed definitions for the concepts of ‘LLT materials’ and ‘materials use.’ These definitions are based on a metasynthesis (i.e., an integrative qualitative analysis) of all of the materials used throughout the 7 empirical articles. Additionally, we explore sociomaterialism as a compelling and well‐suited framework for the study of materials in use. Sociomaterialism is not a unified theory but rather a research orientation that seeks to examine connections between the social and the material world. In addition to substantively and theoretically advancing the field, all the articles of this special issue also have practical implications for language pedagogy.

Ecological approaches to language learning and materials use represent educational settings as complex and dynamic systems by applying relational perspectives from the natural world in the classroom. For young bilingual Ojibwe learners, the natural world (i.e., local, rural, and reservation land) is a significant language learning resource unto itself. In the underrepresented context of Indigenous language reclamation in the Upper Midwest of the United States, local land is central to ways of knowing and being, thus it is also central to learning. This study examines the 'intra-actions' among land-based materials, an Ojibwe Elder, and immersion school youth on local forestland. Focusing on the interrelated nature of human and nonhuman elements, we rely on Indigenous perspectives of relationality and sociomateriality to expand and clarify the roles of land in Indigenous language learning for reclamation. This study highlights Ojibwe practices of relational consensual engagement with the environment and has implications for materials use research, as it underscores the significance of the natural world as emergent language learning and teaching materials.

The social turn in second language acquisition (SLA) has led scholars to involve a more social semiotic approach in their research (Johnson, 2004; Ortega, 2013). In heritage language contexts, this means greater attention to learners as individuals who construct, enact, and resist multiple identities in the classroom (Gee, 2000; McKay & Wong, 1996; Norton & Toohey, 2011; Pierce, 1995). For Arabic heritage language learners (HLLs) the question of identity is fraught with complexities across linguistic (Ryding, 1991; Abu-Rabia, 2000), cultural (Temples, 2013), political (Brown, 2009), social (Sehlaoui, 2008) and religious domains. This paper examines the role of religious identity for second-grade Arabic language learners at a K-12 Islamic school. This sociocultural linguistic study highlights the ways in which learners’ religious identities intersect, support, and overlap with their social and academic identities in a language course exclusively for Muslim HLLs. Findings point to the ways that identity is negotiated through talk, highlighting how Muslim learners draw on their religious identities in Arabic class to support and strengthen their academic and social identities. Religion can serve as a resource for HLLs even in the absence of ethnic and/or ancestral links to the language given adequate ideological and implementational space (Hornberger, 2005).

In this piece, the authors question whether critical language research, in its complex collection of researcher choices, is possible beyond the discursive imaginary of critical academic scholarship. In other words, how do (allegedly) anticolonial efforts re-orient towards contribution to the imperial record? We present three vignettes, through which we grapple with the notion that researcher choice exists within the solipsism of academia. In doing so, we frame research and scholarship as a collection of choices, which we believe are better understood as a collection of fraught dilemmas. These dilemmas recognize that all academic scholarship production and its processes are birthed from, and serve, an epistemology of hierarchical social configurations, which serve empire maintenance and expansion. As critical language scholars who bring overlapping and distinct sociopolitical, geographic, and methodological positionalities, these autoethnographic narrative vignettes allow us to begin to see the landscape of researcher choice in the processes and projects of accumulating knowledge production. We identify imperial straightening devices for legitimization into the imperial archive and examine how they work to orient and re-orient critical language scholars towards the ideological and material production of the imperial archive.