Student Artifacts as Language Learning Materials: A New Materialist Analysis of South Korean Job Seekers’ Student‐Generated Materials Use

Abstract

South Korean job seekers face pressure to produce high scores on standardized English tests, which leads to the prominence of test‐oriented pedagogy. Though recent scholarship illustrates how materials reflect the values of society and how these are negotiated in classrooms it has mainly analyzed preexisting published books, leaving the potential of student‐generated materials (SGMs) underexplored. By using a new materialist perspective (Canagarajah, 2018a; Toohey, 2019), this study (a) investigates how language learning and teaching activities are distributed across SGMs, learners, and classroom resources and (b) what emerges from the intra‐actions of the participants and the resources during and after an 8‐week SGM program. Two participants used business presentation materials, job interview questions, résumés, newspaper articles, and YouTube clips as SGMs. Qualitative thematic analysis of their SGMs, interviews, narratives, field notes, and classroom interaction indicated that the participants’ second‐language (L2) activities with SGMs were distributed across diverse material resources and communication strategies. Their pedagogical outcomes from the SGM‐mediated activities were synergistic, and not reducible to a disembodied cause‐and‐effect analysis. The findings suggest the potential of SGMs for learners to take advantage of distributed L2 repertoires and create new learning opportunities.

Coda: An Expanding Research Agenda for the Use of Instructional Materials

“…Both the Kim & Canagarajah (2021, this issue) and the Alhajimohammed (2020) studies also remind us of how materials use is mediated by the wider context, in line with the emphasis by Guerrettaz et al. (2021, this issue) on the importance of studying the wider environment in research on materials use.…”

“…We normally think of teaching materials as authored by a textbook writer, by some kind of external agent like a local authority or ministry of education, or by the learners’ teacher. However, learners can design their own materials, whether these materials are for the use of their peers or for themselves, acting perhaps as resources for self‐study; Kim and Canagarajah (2021, this issue) focus on these student‐generated materials (SGMs). Kim and Canagarajah explain that their study investigates “how (…) learners create materials, use them with other resources, and design their own ways of L2 learning to achieve their goals” (p. 23).…”

“…One of the potential advantages of SGMs is that they may be able to focus on learners’ needs and relate to their designers’ or users’ lives in a way that traditional textbook or teacher‐produced materials cannot. Hence, we see one of Kim & Canagarajah's (2021, this issue) participants, Joon, authoring SGMs to practise interviews and interview presentations, given his preoccupation with finding employment. It is not that textbook materials are necessarily deficient; but textbook writers are in an unenviable position, inasmuch as they are obliged to try to write materials for diverse groups of learners around the world they have never met and will never teach, with learners’ hopes, interests, learning styles, likes and dislikes, and levels of motivation likely to vary enormously.…”

“…It is understandable if we associate opportunities for learners to produce their own materials with low‐stakes, non‐exam‐driven contexts, as in Kim & Canagarajah (2021, this issue). After all, as Kim and Canagarajah allude to, in exam‐driven contexts, the focus is normally on the test and on textbooks specifically practising test‐like exercises.…”

Materials‐in‐Action: Pedagogical Ergonomics of a French‐as‐a‐Foreign‐Language Classroom

“…Another important aspect of pedagogical ergonomics is classroomscape, which various articles of this special issue depict without explicitly naming (Hasegawa, 2021; Kim & Canagarajah, 2021; Matsumoto, 2021). Their inclusion of classroomscape elements further highlights the construct's utility for investigating materials use.…”