Explorations of sociomaterial in researches on language learning and teaching

For the last several years, we have seen a widening of the conceptual field in the research on language learning and teaching. Many articles published over the last 20 years in the The Canadian Modern Language Review draw on poststructural, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic theories and now occupy an important place alongside articles inspired by psycholinguistic perspectives. Recently, there has been interest in the field for theories of the material. Stemming from several disciplines, work on the topic emerges from various schools of thought, including posthumanism (Braidotti), new materialism (Bennett), and relational ontologies (Barad), among others, and several authors are inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari. According to these perspectives, discursive processes and social activities are entangled in the material world and are ontologically inseparable from it. Thus, the study of learning and teaching phenomena, inspired by these theoretical frameworks, moves away from an analysis centred solely on the person and the social. It examines the relations between the human and the material to find out how they take shape together, change continually, and affect the observed phenomena. In this article, I present some key concepts and avenues of research explored in this work. I also note how researchers explore research methods and conceptualizations of language learning and teaching that differ from those that have been privileged in the field until now.