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

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.