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 mat...

In order to conceptualize materials used in pair-work activities from a sociomaterialist perspective, this study examined the moment-by-moment unfolding of 67 pair-work interactions in beginner- level Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classrooms. The types of pair-work materials used in the focal classrooms—either textbook or teacher-designed activities—were highly controlled with s...

Materials use is a critical yet poorly understood dynamic of language classrooms. This study examines ‘materials-in-action,’ meaning how materials shape classroom interaction and activity, in a beginning-level French-as-a-foreign-language classroom. The conceptual framework, ‘pedagogical ergonomics,’ similarly centers on materials-in-action, and more specifically on ‘intra-action.’ This re...

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 languag...

The rationale behind this special issue is to underscore the importance of studying instructional materials in context—that is, how materials and textbooks are used by teachers and learners. Research on teaching materials needs to reach beyond traditional ‘armchair ’ analyses and evaluations to appreciate the place of instructional materials in the wider social and education...