Decolonizing ELT materials: a sociomaterial orientation

Abstract

This article adopts a sociomaterial perspective on ELT materials and illustrates how a mandatory textbook is used as a springboard to create decolonizing relations in the classroom ecology. Sociomaterial perspectives view learning as not the transmission but the emergence of knowledge from embodied relations, which shifts the focus from the textbook itself to the relations surrounding it. Based on this shift, this article first provides exploratory questions for teachers to understand the classroom ecology. A set of example activities in a beginner-level Japanese EFL class follows, which showcase how a textbook published by a global publisher could be turned into a springboard to attract translingual and multimodal materials and meaning-making resources. Learning emerges through the entangled relationships of the prescribed textbook, materials, resources, students, and teachers. The article concludes with practical implications to enrich the ELT classroom ecology.