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.
Keywords: student-generated materials; new materialism; entanglements; distributed practices; language ideology; language tests
LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING (LLT) materials embody the socioideological values of society. Such ideologies are conceptualized as “derived from, rooted in, reflective of, or responsive to the experience or interests of a particular social position, even though ideology so often (in some views, always) represents itself as universally true” (Woolard, 1998, p. 6). LLT materials represent a selected set of ideologies and provide learning activities for learners, who tend to internalize those ideologies (Canale, 2016; Lee, 2014; Rifkin, 1998; Stranger–Johannessen, 2015; Wang, 2016). The internalization is further accelerated because the published textbooks are perceived to have authority in the subject matter (de Castell, 1990). For instance, some LLT materials prompt students to follow neoliberal economic values (Bori, 2020) and reflect gender disparities and stereotypes (Lee, 2014; Rifkin, 1998). Yet, ince the materials yield affordances for adaptation in the classroom (Guerrettaz & Johnston, 2013), some teachers and students engage in subverting the ideological content (Canagarajah, 1993; Gray, 2010, 2012) rather than treating the materials as authoritative and trustworthy. Scholars have also defined ideologies as sometimes inconsistent and conflicting, allowing spaces for renegotiation (Woolard, 1998). In short, the learning materials contain a body of knowledge intertwined with ideologies and yield affordances for critical adaptation in situated learning contexts.
In South Korea (henceforth, Korea), test- oriented learning materials dominate the English-language teaching (ELT) textbook market for job preparation. Test-preparation books have been best sellers for the last 10 years (Kim, 2018), while general business LLT materials receive much less attention. Among the most influential are Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) preparation textbooks. By their nature, the content of the test-preparation books depends heavily on the test content and format. Accordingly, they present formulaic English, introduce a limited range of topics, and provide drills to help students develop test-taking skills to succeed in the multiple-choice format. The textbooks act as authoritative in test-preparation schools called hakwons. The proliferation of test-oriented materials and pedagogies has negative consequences, as the learners are directed toward being drilled in adopting test-taking strategies at the expense of developing communicative competence (Booth, 2018).
While prepackaged test-oriented materials leave little room for addressing individual job seekers’ needs for communication, proposals for ways to equip these job seekers with the English skills they need are scarce. Therefore, we explore from a new materialist perspective (Barad, 2003, 2007; Toohey, 2019) the potentials of student- generated materials (SGMs) for developing the skills. In this study, we address two research questions:
RQ1. How were the LLT activities distributed across learners, SGMs, and other resources?
RQ2. What emerges from the entangled relationships of the learners, class- room resources, and ideologies in Korea?
We begin by introducing the test-oriented pedagogy in Korea and arguing for the need to explore the possibility of SGMs. We then provide a rationale for using a new materialist perspective, followed by a description of the experimental study, findings, and discussion.
TEST-ORIENTED LEARNING IN KOREA AND THE POTENTIAL OF STUDENT-GENERATED MATERIALS
The importance of standardized English tests in the job market has led to the shared local ideology that a high TOEIC score, preferably higher than 800 out of 990, is mandatory (Abelmann, Park, & Kim, 2014). High scores on English speaking tests, either the TOEIC speaking test or the Oral Proficiency Interview–computer (OPIc) test, also increase the chances of employment. The reason behind this belief is that more than 1,100 well-known corporations require the scores in the initial screening process (Multicampus, 2017; YBMNET, 2018). The heavy reliance on the tests originates from the deep-rooted test-driven culture in Korea, which conceives high test scores “as determining social status and therefore life- long success in socially stratified Korea” (Jung, 2013, p. 49). In this context, the ideology—that high scores on English tests indicate eligibility for white-collar jobs—is widely shared. Accordingly, hakwons (private language schools) provide shortcuts to achieving higher scores in the shortest possible time. It is common to teach test-wiseness (Booth, 2018), such as guessing the right answer in the multiple-choice TOEIC test, using tricks, and memorizing sample answers (Jeong, 2015). The hakwons produce and circulate test-oriented materials by setting up their own publishing companies, and the materials have been best sellers for the last 10 years (Kim, 2018).
Ultimately, there is a triad of test-oriented ideologies, pedagogies, and materials in the English education market for Korean job seekers. While this triad results in excessive investment in English tests and a disjuncture between test scores and actual English proficiency (Kim, Choi, & Kim, 2018), specific pedagogical proposals to address the negative influences are scarce.
How can we solve the problem of test-oriented learning? Although both job seekers and employers are well aware of the problem (Kim et al., 2018), there is no simple panacea for it. There- fore, we decided to turn the question around and learn from the job seekers. If they are given an opportunity to design their own ways of learning with their tools and resources, how will they use it to achieve their goals? What can we learn from the job seekers’ journeys to their goals? To this end, this study explores the possibilities of SGMs for the job seekers to chart their own course of second-language (L2) learning to arrive at their goals.
Previous scholarship has extensively studied the effects of learner-generated pedagogical interventions. Psycholinguistic studies have investigated learner-generated focus on form (Williams, 2001), noticing (Park, 2011), and form–meaning mapping elaborations in vocabulary learning (Deconinck, Boers, & Eyckmans, 2017). These studies have found generally positive links between learner-generated attention and L2 focus on form, L2 input noticing, and L2 vocabulary recall. In task-based language teaching (TBLT) studies, learners were allowed to design instructional games (Butler, 2017a, 2017b) or content for the learning tasks (Brown, Iyobe, & Riley, 2013; Lam- bert, Philp, & Nakamura, 2017; Lambert & Zhang, 2019). The TBLT studies have found that learners’ creation of games and content generally contributed to learners’ autonomy, motivation, enjoyment, and engagement in English use.
These studies allowed learners to create content, but the task types were already designed by the researchers, such as input noticing (Park, 2011); form–meaning mappings (Deconinck et al., 2017); instructional games (Butler 2017a, 2017b); negotiation scenarios (Brown et al., 2013); explanation, narration, and opinion (Lambert & Zhang, 2019); and story-telling (Lambert et al., 2017). However, we are interested in not only what the material contains but also how the material is used in relation to other resources, because this study is aimed at investigating how the learners create materials, use them with other resources, and design their own ways of L2 learning to achieve their goals. Therefore, we broadly define SGMs as all artifacts and activities that the students use according to their own interests to engage with meaning-making resources, which include not only learner-generated content (LGC; e.g., Brown et al., 2013; Lambert et al., 2017; Lambert & Zhang, 2019) but also content generated by others and used as LLT materials by the students. This broad definition allows us to expand the focus from materials to materials use.
INVESTIGATING THE USE OF STUDENT-GENERATED MATERIALS FROM A NEW MATERIALIST PERSPECTIVE
To investigate Korean job seekers’ SGM uses, we draw on a new materialist perspective (Barad, 2003, 2007; Canagarajah, 2018a; Toohey, 2019). The rationale for doing so is as follows: (a) countering traditional binaries and hierarchies such as human–nonhuman or subject–object, the new materialist perspective encourages us to consider how they are entangled in meaning-making, (b) it allows us to investigate the distributed practices in classrooms of diverse resources working together, without isolating SGMs, learners, or teachers, and (c) it rejects linear cause–effect relationships and analyzes how phenomena emerge from the entan- glements of entities.
First, new materialism challenges ‘thingification’ and shifts the focus from things to distributed practice. Thingification, according to Barad (2003), is “the turning of relations into ‘things,’ ‘entities,’ ‘relata’” (p. 812). From a new materialist perspective, entities do not enter into a relation; they “emerge from [emphasis in original] relation in a given phenomenon” (Snaza et al., 2016, p. xvii). In other words, relation precedes entities, and not vice versa. It dismantles the binaries of subject–object, mind–matter, nature–culture, individual–social, and human– nonhuman, thereby opening up possibilities in analyzing how all agentive entities intra-act and generate diverse nonlinear phenomena. For in- stance, feminism and queer studies draw on new materialism to deconstruct structural determinism; traverse the binaries; and analyze the mak- ing of body, power, sexuality, race, and class in material relations (Braidotti, 2017; Coole & Frost, 2010; Dorphijin & van der Tuin, 2012).
In terms of L2 learning, the structuralist views of language consider an L2 as an organized and hierarchical system and learners as agents who develop L2 competence in their minds, starting from grammar to pragmatics in a linear and cumulative fashion (Canagarajah, 2018a). LLT is a transfer of ‘things’ from the teachers to the learners through LLT materials and activities. Rejecting the thingification, a new materialist perspective perceives languaging—the activity of using language—as a distributed practice involving the learners’ body, cognition, and all semiotic resources in the environment (Toohey, 2019). It allows us to examine how LLT practices are distributed across all matters and how the matters agentially intra-act (Barad, 2003, 2007) al- together, without essentializing LLT materials, teachers, and learners, and presuming the existence of binaries or hierarchies between the entities.
Second, a new materialist perspective provides an analytical lens through which nonlinear phenomena emerging from a network of entities can be examined. Traditional metaphors of learning, such as the acquisition metaphor (AM) and participation metaphor (PM), view learners as recipients of knowledge (AM) or active participants who learn by socializing in a community (PM; Sfard, 1998). These metaphors have been prevalent in L2 teaching and learning, such as instructed L2 learning (cf. Loewen, 2015) and L2 socialization (cf. Watson–Gegeo, 2004). While both metaphors contributed significantly to our body of knowledge for L2 learning, they prioritize human actors over material resources and view learners as agents who acquire or construct linguistic knowledge.
New materialism provides alternative metaphors—namely, distribution and emergence. Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk (2011) suggested that “learning is an effect of the net-works of the material, humans and non-humans, that identify certain practices as learning” (p. 6). Learning is not a result of a few causes; it is distributed in, and emerges from, the intra-acting entities in the networks. Furthermore, the learning outcomes exceed or transcend individual resources. Accordingly, learners are not containers of knowledge, but participants of the network of human and nonhuman entities. For example, a mathematician’s L2 competence is distributed among the blackboard, speech, gestures, postures, positioning, and communication strategies (Canagarajah, 2018a). Kindergarteners’ English languaging emerges from the intra-actions of all entities in the classroom, including (but not limited to) their bodies, curriculum documents, chants, songs, and verbal and nonverbal vocalizations (Toohey, 2019). The studies provided alternative viewpoints, conceptualizing language as distributed (Canagarajah, 2018a, 2018b; Toohey, 2019). The new metaphors enable us to examine the nonlinear rhizomatic relationships of all entities in the classroom.
In this study, we approach job seekers’ use of SGMs from a new materialist perspective. We demonstrate that their L2 learning emerges from the orchestration of human and nonhuman entities in their assemblages, which cannot be reduced to a few factors; learners are participants in entangled relationships who use distributed L2 repertoires—not passive recipients who absorb L2 content from LLT materials or teachers.
RESEARCH DESIGN
Context and Participants
Data from this study is part of a larger case re- search on Korean job seekers’ negotiation of neoliberalism and English-language learning (Kim, 2020). The study took place in an 8-week experimental program for 12 entry-level job seekers who had experienced test-oriented English learning and sought to develop English speaking skills to achieve their job-seeking goals. The program was not associated with any institution (e.g., hakwons, universities, or companies); it was a noncredit in- dependent program designed for research purposes and led by the first author, Miso. It consisted of two 120-minute sessions per week: a whole- group session (WS) and a pair session (PS). The WS was designed to develop general English work- place skills with premade materials in a whole- class setting. The PS allowed the participants to lead their own activities to practice specific English skills with SGMs in a more individualized setting. As the article aims to analyze the use of SGMs, data collected in PSs are the primary focus of the study.
From a new materialist perspective, the re- searcher’s body, memories, emotions, and all other aspects intra-act with those whom she observes (Barad, 2003), and the researcher is part of the entanglements (Fenwick et al., 2011). The traditional researcher–participant binary no longer holds true. The researcher is simultaneously a participant. The researcher–participant (i.e., Miso) set up video cameras, wrote field notes, and inter- viewed the participants for the research; simultaneously, she participated in the research by collaborating with the job seekers when they used SGMs to design and lead their learning activities. Data for this study were shaped and collected through- out the intra-actions in the PS seminar room.
The job seekers were in their 20s and had at- tended or recently graduated from 4-year col- leges in Korea. They spoke Korean as their first language and had had less than 1 year of expe- rience living in Anglophone countries. For in- depth analysis, we chose to highlight two par- ticipants (see Table 1), Joon and Jiwon (both pseudonyms), because they attended all eight PSs, reported limitations on studying English for test purposes, and used SGMs to compensate for these limitations.
Data Collection and Analysis
The following data are the focus of the analysis: (a) the participants’ SGMs, (b) two interviews in Weeks 1 and 2, (c) pre- and post-picture narratives, (d) approximately 32 hours of video- recorded PS interaction, and (e) field notes. The participants’ SGMs and activities are listed in Table 2.1 In the Week 1 PS, Miso interviewed the participants about their motivation for joining this study, their job backgrounds, and experiences with English. In the Week 2 PS, the second interview was based on the participants’ answers to a self-assessment sheet describing their self-concepts as learners of English, tools and re- sources, desired English skills, and short- and long-term goals. The interviews allowed both Miso and the participants to diagnose how they see themselves as language learners, what tools and resources they can mobilize, and what they want to achieve by working with SGMs. Based on the information from the interviews, the participants and Miso set out plans on what tools and resources to use from Week 3 on. The picture narratives asked participants to choose or draw a picture representing what English meant to them and explain it in one or two paragraphs, in either English or Korean. The narratives enabled Miso to understand the meanings and values the participants associated with English and the participants to reflect upon their development by comparing the two narratives at the end of program. Video- recorded PS interactions captured all of the interviews and the participants’ interaction with SGMs and Miso. The field notes were written (by Miso) immediately after each session and comprehensively documented the uses of SGMs, the participants’ learning and interaction, and other observations.
Qualitative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) was chosen for data analysis. It is a “systemic approach to the analysis of qualitative data that involves identifying themes or patterns” (Lapadat, 2012, p. 926) and is particularly suitable for examining patterns across different types of data in qualitative study design (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Fereday & Muir–Cochrane, 2006; Lapadat, 2012). Since the article aims to address the questions with a number of multiple qualitative data sources, thematic analysis was chosen. Following Braun & Clarke’s (2006) guidelines, we first familiarized ourselves with the data by reviewing them and taking notes. Then we generated initial codes to collate data under each code. We searched for potential themes by categorizing different codes into the overarching theme, reviewed the coded data closely to ensure that each theme represented the collated data, and refined the themes several times to ensure that the data addressed the questions. The entire process was recursive and iterative.
The first RQ focuses on distributed LLT practices in SGM-mediated learning activities. We present the two participants’ cases. Joon, a highly motivated learner who wants to get a job, used finance-related SGMs to practice how to deliver his professional content knowledge in English. Ji- won, who began practicing English for job seeking, used her résumés as SGMs to practice English speaking skills.
Joon: Connecting Student-Generated Materials and Other Resources to Deliver a Presentation About His Expertise
Given that Joon was eager to land a job in finance, his SGMs mostly comprised interview practice questions or content related to financial technology (see Table 2). For instance, in Week 6, Joon conducted a presentation about simulated investment. The presentation file was entirely written in Korean. He had already delivered the presentation in Korean and got accepted to one of the most prestigious competitions hosted by Samsung. Drawing on his professional content knowledge, he wanted to practice delivering his presentation in English because his ultimate goal was to be able to explain financial instruments to foreign buyers. The presentation was displayed on Miso’s laptop, which was placed on the desk between Joon and Miso. Joon’s slides in Korean with English captions by Miso are shown in Figures 1 and 2. Excerpt 1 is Joon’s (JN) first attempt to ex- plain the graphs in Figures 1 and 2 to Miso (MS). Transcription conventions are provided in the Appendix.
In this first excerpt, Joon tried to present his stock market analysis. His main point was that the Korean stock market was facing problems be- cause the gross-domestic-product (GDP) growth rate and standard interest rates were steadily decreasing (1–7), the current balance was stagnant (8–15), the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) was boxed in (16–22), and Samsung Electronics and information-technology (IT) industries were the only contributors to the KOSPI index (23–31). As he tried to explain it, he employed some communication strategies such as using a long pause (5), raising intonation (10), drawing what he meant with his index finger (18), and switching to Korean (23). Miso also interrupted when his intended meaning was not clear: “till,” “still,” and “understable” in lines 10, 12, and 19, respectively. Joon practiced the new expressions by showing uptake: “stagnated” (15), “unstable” (21),“steady growth” (26), “led by” (28), and “IT industries” (31).
After his first attempt, Miso googled “English expressions charts and graphs” and showed Joon several Web pages that provided expressions (e.g., steadily increased/decreased, rise, break the record, plum- meted, and slightly) and example sentences. Joon navigated the Web sites on his own, took some notes, and practiced the expressions on his own by murmuring them while Miso was talking to another participant. After that, Joon volunteered to present again. Excerpt 2 is his second attempt to explain the same slides.
This second excerpt illustrates how Joon has taken up the linguistic repertoires from the previous interaction with Miso and the Web site. Com- pared to his earlier attempt, he used “decreased” (3–4; instead of “downsized” or “went to down” in line 3 of Excerpt 1), “rise” (6; instead of “has been up” in line 9 of Excerpt 1), “stagnated” (6; instead of “till” and “still” in lines 10 and 12 of Excerpt 1), “unstable” (10; instead of “understable” in line 19 of Excerpt 1). Also, he picked up the repertoires to mean “current balance” (5) and “broke the highest record” (l9). He learned to use a transition, “I want to explain the stock market analysis” in line 7.
Joon delivered his English presentation by utilizing a number of resources distributed in the entanglements in the classroom. Figure 3 is a visual representation of the distributed practice. Since the classroom had numerous material resources, we chose resources that were directly related to the excerpts. While the purpose of this class was to practice English speaking skills, Joon’s SGMs did not have any English terms. However, they could still be used for LLT as they were entangled with other entities in the classroom. Neither Joon nor Miso had the individual knowledge ‘competence’ to deliver the finance presentation, as Joon did not have a sufficiently extensive English reper- toire whereas Miso had no knowledge in finance. None of the resources in Figure 3 was able to ac- count for the presentation alone; the presentation was only made possible because they intra- acted in the entanglements.
Jiwon: Connecting Student-Generated Materials and
Other Resources to Explain Her Work Experience
Jiwon’s SGMs in Weeks 4 and 5 comprised two versions of her English résumé: paper and electronic. Jiwon wrote the paper version for a class activity in a Week 4 WS, typed and polished it at home, and then brought the electronic version to the Week 4 PS, which took place 4 days after the WS. Jiwon and Miso put the paper résumé on the table and displayed the electronic version on Jiwon’s laptop. Jiwon asked Miso to ask questions about her work experience using the résumé. Figure 4 is a snippet of her paper résumé with her personal information deleted.
Jiwon and Miso worked on editing her electronic résumé at the beginning of the session, for her future job applications. Afterward, they began to interact in English to discuss her work experiences. Miso read this line on the résumé: “[Company name] communications, Co.—[city], South Korea, worked at a overseas marketing team. Contacted new buyers and promoted company’s items. Exported items to a new buyer.” Miso asked, “Would you explain your role in this company [company name] in terms of communication?” Excerpt 3 is part of Jiwon’s (JW) response.
Jiwon tried to explain that she was able to successfully promote the products of her company at an exhibition in Birmingham by asking for and following the advice from Korea Inter- national Trade Organization (KITA). While explaining, she repeated the previous phrase several times to gain more time to come up with the next utterance and self-correct (2–4, 12–13, 17–18, 21, 34) or looked at the screen to read the electronic résumé and get hints about what to say next (14, 16–17, 21, 35). If she failed to complete the sentence, she elongated the last syllable, looking at Miso and waiting for Miso to give the expression (14). Also, she code-switched to Korean, implicitly asking Miso to suggest appropriate English expressions (6, 24, 27, and 32). After she received help, she tried using the new expression several times to tailor them to her own utterances: “keep contacting” (8), “the advice” (16–17), “consultation” and “have a consultation” (24–31). When- ever she faced problems, she first tried to resolve them on her own, either by repeating what she said or correcting herself. Miso’s mediation was twofold: acting as a conversation partner by replying to her utterances or echoing some of her utterances to show cooperation (5, 11, 20, 34) and responding to learner-initiated repairs (7, 15, 26, 28, 30, 33).
Jiwon’s explanation took place in the entanglements of Miso, the two versions of her résumé, and her communication strategies, among others. Figure 5 summarizes the resources that directly participated in Jiwon’s explanation. Jiwon did not pick up the new English expressions from the SGMs or Miso; she picked them up as she was intra-acting with Miso, her SGMs, and others. The paper résumé motivated her to write a more polished version for her future job applications, the revised electronic résumé provided quick ideas about what to say next whenever she needed them to formulate a response, her laptop displayed the résumé, English and Korean were her verbal repertoires, and Miso offered English help in response to Jiwon’s strategies to elongate the last syllables or to code-switch. Jiwon’s performance was not a result of Jiwon’s (lack of) English competence in discussing her work experience, but rather, the performance was distributed in the entanglement of diverse resources.
PHENOMENA THAT EMERGED FROM THE ENTANGLEMENTS
The second RQ examines what emerges from the entangled relationships of the participants, SGMs, resources, and ideologies in Korea. While the first RQ focused on distributed practices in the classroom space, the second RQ zooms out to include the participants’ lives outside of the classroom.
Joon: Landing His Dream Job and Integrating
Disjointed Pieces of Knowledge
Joon first came to the class with the feeling that he was a blind man touching an elephant when- ever he used English, meaning that his knowledge about English was disjointed and superficial. In his first picture narrative, he attached a picture of an elephant in Figure 6 and stated,3 “I have always studied English for the tests,” which resulted in accumulating incoherent pieces of knowledge irrelevant to actual use. He had taken many tests and achieved a comparatively high score (TOEIC 920 out of 990). However, he could not answer in English the job interview question, “How can you persuade your customer better?” He could not help blaming himself for being “stupid” and re- calling this experience as “traumatic,” because he learned the hard way that test-oriented training cannot be used for responding orally in a high- stakes situation. He came to the program with the goal of “putting all things [pieces of knowledge in English] together” to use English as if he were viewing the elephant as an integrated whole.
To overcome his “traumatic” experience, Joon always brought SGMs on English interviews or finance. From Week 3 to 5, he practiced responding to a list of interview questions in a Korean job search Web site, JobErum. Its members-only page listed more than 200 interview questions and answers. Joon wrote responses to the questions at home, brought them to the classroom, and asked his PS partner to ask a random question and Miso to give feedback. In these SGM-mediated activities, Joon tried to employ “ventriloquized speech of the corporation” (Agha, 2011, p. 45), meaning that he was keen to speak the language of the employers, rather than speaking with his own voice. For instance, in Week 4, Joon was responding to a question on the Web site, which asked his hobby. At first, Joon said playing basketball with friends refreshed him, but he was not sure how to present it as marketable. Joon thought for a while, and with a finger snap began to reply in English: “As I know, the position what I will is re- ally stressful. So if I got stress, if I got stress in the future, I can relieve the stress myself with basket- ball.” When he responded to a question on weaknesses, he said that he tended to push himself too hard whenever he had to work in a team, emphasizing that he was a hard worker. In Week 5, Joon and his PS partner complained about “slave-like working culture” they had experienced at private companies, which involved working overtime and doing pointless work repeatedly; however, when Joon was asked to answer to the interview question, “how do you (feel about) working late or overtime?,” Joon replied, “if we meet our work– life balance, we can’t improve our career. So, I will work overtime if I should for my work.” Joon also stressed an episode of fixing a tank during his 2-year mandatory military service, presenting himself as a proactive self-initiator who can readily adapt to a hierarchical corporate culture.
During and after the 8-week period, what emerged from the intra-actions of Joon, his SGMs, Miso, the resources, and the ideologies was twofold: (a) Joon succeeded in getting a job at a finance firm, and (b) he expressed that he was able to assemble discrete pieces of English knowledge together and integrate them into his business English repertoire. The former could not be attributed to his English proficiency because the finance firm scheduled an English interview but did not conduct it during the actual hiring process. Rather, it might have emerged as a result of the nonlinear intra-action in Joon’s assemblages, which consisted of Joon’s high TOEIC score, his professional knowledge on finance, and his strategic use of “ventriloquized speech” (Agha, 2011, p. 45) to conform to the corporate ideology that normalizes ‘slave-like working culture.’
Joon’s strategic use of language emerged from his intra-action with the resources in the classroom. As he practiced with SGMs and connected them with other resources, he was able re-appropriate the previous test-related knowledge to participate in interviews and deliver finance presentations. For instance, after the presentation in Excerpts 1 and 2, Joon recalled, “I have memorized all of them [the new words and expressions he learned while delivering the presentation] from my yellow book [a popular TOEIC vocabulary book that has a yellow cover] but did not know they could be used in this way.” The words and expressions remained distant and disjointed to him when he picked them up from the yellow book. However, as noted by Bakhtin (1981), a word becomes one’s own “only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (p. 293). Intra-acting with SGMs and other entities provided this very opportunity to Joon, enabling him to populate the words and expressions with his own meanings and intentions. What emerged from this intra-action was the putting together of disjointed pieces of knowledge and forming a coherent whole. He finished the 8-week program with the feeling that he had become a traveler who enjoyed the journey of learning English (Figure 7)—and not a blind man touching an elephant.
Jiwon: Leaving Korea in Pursuit of a Better Life
While Joon kept a clear goal of getting a job through the 8-week period, Jiwon had been wavering over her goals, and accordingly, her SGM uses kept changing. Jiwon first mentioned that she was rejected for a job position because she had had a TOEIC Speaking Level 6, whereas the position required Level 7. She described the experience as a “crisis” and her plans were “all messed up” be- cause of the low score. She wanted to improve her scores and develop English speaking skills; her attempts to achieve this at the hakwons, despite several efforts, had ended up being in vain because “I haven’t felt I was developing” and “the expressions they [foreigners she met during her back- pack trip] used were totally different from what I had learned at the hakwons, and they spoke so fast, unlike what I did for something like the listening test. Also, the expressions were very unfamiliar, so I couldn’t understand.” To develop communication skills, she first tried to get higher scores on the test by practicing speaking skills with Love Actually video clips. She soon realized that she would benefit more from practicing job-specific tasks for both the tests and interviews, thus using versions of her English résumé as SGMs in Weeks 4 and 5. From Week 4, however, Jiwon began doubting whether getting a job in Korea was the best option for her, as the workplace culture could be discriminatory to young women.
The doubt led her to switch to using SGMs on ideological issues. From Weeks 6 to 8, she engaged with criticizing ideologies in Korea, particularly gender- and family-related issues, by using newspaper articles and YouTube clips as prompts for English discussion. For instance, she brought an English-language article on a highly controversial and politically loaded topic, popular Korean actor Yoo Ah–in, in Week 7. This article by Yoon (2017), titled “Yoo Ah–in Moves to End ‘Gender Bashing’ Dispute with Netizens,” summarized a controversy in which Yoo proclaimed himself as a feminist but was accused of being a misogynist.
Jiwon first read over the article on Miso’s laptop and looked up several words while reading: gender bashing, fridge, and liken. After she finished read- ing, she opened the discussion in English, “gender bashing is a serious issue in Korea,” and problematized Yoo’s message, “the problem is that who insist they are feminist themselves make the images of the feminist in a bad way.” Miso, who happened to be familiar with the controversy, participated in the discussion. Miso pointed out that Yoo identified himself as a feminist because he wanted to portray himself as a sensitive male pop star. Jiwon went on to criticize Yoo’s self-presentation, saying in English, “I also read another articles about him. The article said he isn’t a feminist be- cause he treated the people who was sarcastic to him differently. A guy, I don’t know who he is, a guy mentioned in the post, and Yoo Ah–in replied in calm manner, but a woman also criticized him, and he was very sarcastic to her. So that is one of the reasons why he isn’t the real feminist in that article I read.” What she meant was that Yoo replied gently to a male critic but sarcastically to a female critic, which showed Yoo’s subconscious misogyny. Jiwon and Miso continued to talk about this issue by looking up other articles on Miso’s laptop, and further discussed misogyny in Korea.
Such critical discussion was only possible due to the entanglements of entities both in and out of the classroom: Jiwon wanted to criticize misogyny in Korea; Miso was knowledgeable on feminist discourses in Korea; the laptop displayed multiple newspaper articles about Yoo Ah–in; the newspaper articles problematized Yoo’s nuanced misogyny; misogyny could be highlighted because there has been a surge of interest in feminism in Korea since 2015; these feminist discourses were closely intertwined with gender inequality in Korean job markets and workplaces. Jiwon also gradually came to realize the existence of inequality. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Korea’s working hours are the third longest (OECD, 2019b), the work–life balance is fourth from the worst (OECD, 2019c), and the gender wage gap is the highest (OECD, 2019a) among the 34 OECD countries. Jiwon expressed, “I think men don’t realize their privilege” (Week 4), “because I hate Korea”6 (Week 5), and “I’m still young and I don’t want to sacrifice my life to the company. I want to enjoy my life more” (Week 6).
What emerged from these entanglements was that Jiwon decided to quit seeking jobs in Korea. She chose to temporarily leave Korea because she felt that it was “suffocating” to follow the main- stream rite of passage for a young Korean woman: getting a job after going through the competitive hiring process, handling a heavy workload, getting married, having a kid, and then juggling the duties of a working mother while tolerating misogyny and receiving a lesser salary than her male counterparts. She seriously considered applying for working holiday programs in Australia, getting an au pair job overseas, or backpacking abroad. Miso, who previously struggled with a gender- discriminatory workplace culture and had extensive overseas experience, happened to be a good resource for Jiwon. Eight weeks after the study ended, Jiwon indeed left Korea to begin back- packing and studying in Vietnam.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The two participants, who had experienced the limitations of test-oriented learning before joining this program, experimented with SGMs to create their own ways of learning for the 8-week period. Working with SGMs yielded unexpected outcomes, such as re-appropriating test-oriented knowledge (Joon) and exploring alternative opportunities beyond getting a job in Korea by obtaining a high score on the TOEIC speaking test (Jiwon). We are not arguing that SGMs could be the solution for all test-related learning problems. However, SGMs may provide opportunities for learners to think about what they want to use in the classroom, connect their goals with SGMs and other resources, and intra-act in the entanglements to prepare for the future they want in a flexible manner.
The first RQ asked how the LLT activities were distributed across learners, SGMs, and other re- sources. The excerpts indicate distributed LLT practices across different entities in the classroom (Korean presentation slides, Web search results, notes, Miso’s laptop, and Miso in Excerpts 1 and 2; two versions of résumés, Jiwon’s laptop, and Miso in Excerpt 3), all of which were entangled with the communicative resources (e.g., gaze, pauses, elongation, and code-switching). Note that the participants’ responses during the activities did not follow the typical initiation–response– feedback/evaluation (IRF/E) sequence that is frequently found in classroom discourse (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). In the IRF/E sequence, the instructor has the locus of control to initiate and evaluate the students’ responses. The excerpts were the reverse, as the participants chose or designed their own LLT materials, initiated the performances, asked for feedback either directly or indirectly, expanded their English repertoires from other resources, and used new expressions on their own. The L2 expressions were not transmitted from the instructor to the learner. Rather, they were distributed across all entities intra-acting together.
The new materialist analysis calls for shifting the focus from individual resources to relations in studies of LLT materials. LLT materials are not ‘things’ that deliver L2 knowledge. Instead, they intra-act with learners and other resources in the classroom. Joon’s SGMs did not even have English text at all, but they were still used as LLT materials as they could be readily connected to other classroom resources to aid Joon’s finance presentation. Jiwon’s résumés, too, were not by any means textbook-like—both versions had linguistic errors and awkward expressions. However, they connected Jiwon’s previous professional experience with other resources in the classroom, providing Jiwon the opportunity to practice English speaking with the help of the resources. The two cases suggest the possibility that the LLT materials’ entanglements are as important as the extensive research on LLT materials’ content, research on their actual use has been scarce (Guerrettaz & Johnston, 2013; Matsumoto, 2019). Therefore, it would be necessary to further ex- amine how the materials entangle with other re- sources, rather than essentializing the materials.
The second RQ asked what emerged from the entangled relationships of the participants, class- room resources, and ideologies in Korea. This study found that what emerged from intra-acting with SGMs was nonlinear, unpredictable, and irreducible to a few factors. Both Joon and Jiwon joined the program because they were tired of the test-oriented learning at hakwons and wanted to practice speaking skills with their resources to obtain jobs. Although Joon succeeded in getting a job, it was not a result of his English training, because the company cancelled the English interview without prior notice. He was able to integrate the disjointed pieces of test-oriented English knowledge together, but this emerged from the assemblages of his resources and cannot be explained by a few causes. In Jiwon’s case, she did not get a job but made a more satisfactory decision, which was totally unexpected. Her case illustrates “the importance of bodies in situating empirical actors within a material environment of nature, other bodies, and the socioeconomic structures that dictate where and how they find sustenance, satisfy their desires, or obtain the resources necessary for participating in political life” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 19). Her decision to go abroad emerged from her intra-action within the material environment, which included Miso, classroom resources, gender-discriminatory ideologies, toxic corporate cultures, and SGMs that reflected such ideologies.
The metaphor of emergence enables us to ac- knowledge the nonlinearity and unpredictability of LLT materials’ uses and their influences on students’ lives. The participants’ SGMs were not produced as LLT materials per se, and even after they were used as LLT materials, they did not bring about the results the participants wanted at the beginning of the program. Rather, the SGMs were entangled with numerous other entities and ideologies, with the results emerging from the entanglements. Previous studies on LLT materials have illustrated how learners make use of the latter in ways that are different from the way the materials were intended (Hasegawa, 2018; Matsumoto, 2019). Taking it a step further, this study suggests that learners’ usages of LLT materials may open up unexpected opportunities in their lives depending on how the entangled.
While we analyzed the participants’ SGM uses, the metaphors of distribution and emergence are demonstrated in the uses of premade materials as well. Learning activities mediated by premade materials also involve numerous artifacts (e.g., black- board, worksheets, projection screen, and textbook; Matsumoto, 2019), and various phenomena may emerge, such as students’ critique of text- book ideologies and teachers’ critical adaptation (Canagarajah, 1993; Gray, 2000; Sunderland et al., 2001). The key difference between premade materials and SGMs lies in the fact that SGMs allow the learners to orchestrate their learning procedures, rather than following the de facto curriculum given by textbooks or teachers’ adaptations of the textbook-driven curriculum.
The findings are exploratory, given that the project spanned only 8 weeks and the data are limited to two cases obtained in a small-group setting. Using SGMs in a longer term or a bigger classroom setting may yield different results. Therefore, further research of the following type may be needed: (a) in-depth longitudinal research on SGMs and (b) action research on incorporating SGMs in institutionalized settings. The previous studies (e.g., Brown et al., 2013; Lambert et al., 2017; Lambert & Zhang, 2019) and this study considered the use of SGMs in a semester or shorter periods. As Jiwon’s case hinted, learners’ experience with SGMs might influence their life trajectories in the longer term; therefore, it would be fruitful to study learners’ use of SGMs in relation to the classroom and society longitudinally. Second, while the participants in this study could enjoy the freedom of using SGMs of their individual choice and interacting with the instructor in a small-group and noninstitutional setting, this might be difficult in institutionalized settings because of situational constraints. Teacher–researchers’ authentic studies on incorporating SGMs would generate meaningful suggestions on benefitting from SGMs in classes while meeting the institutional demands.
The study leaves us with the following pedagogical implications. First, any artifacts, which may not look like LLT materials, can be turned into LLT materials in the entanglements with learners and other classroom resources. As Snaza et al. (2016) argued, things do not precede relations—things emerge from relations. Therefore, more attention should be paid on how appropriately the materials can be used in the classroom entanglements, as well as how well the materials are made. Second, incorporating SGMs may offer opportunities for students to flexibly connect their content knowledge, L2 repertoires, L1 resources, and other classroom artifacts to develop their L2 communication skills. The students can choose SGMs directly related to their goals and practice language skills in the way they see appropriate and viable in the classroom. The teacher’s job is to strategically emplace (Canagarajah, 2018a, 2018b) students in a rich material network to make meaning, not controlling the students’ learning activities. Finally, teachers’ reflexive practices and life experiences could be used as meaningful resources for facilitating students’ L2 learning in the class- room, because teachers are not deliverers of L2 knowledge but participants of learners’ assemblages. For instance, Miso’s familiarity with feminism was not related to her LLT expertise at all, but it turned into a resource for Jiwon to share her opinion in English. Likewise, teachers’ diverse experience could be readily mobilized as LLT re- sources, along with their professional L2 knowledge and teaching skills
注：本文选自The Modern Language Journal 105（2021）21–38。由于篇幅所限，注释和参考文献已省略。
