Ebook: A posthumanist perspective on an English course at a private language school

This doctoral dissertation has as its main focus the discussion of an English language education experience from a posthumanist perspective. This study was done with a group of six students at a private language school located in Goiânia, in the state of Goiás, in the Central West region of Brazil, in 2019. In addition to being the inquirer, I was also the teacher of that group. In this investigation, supported by arguments from posthumanism aligned with critical applied linguistics, I seek to promote a deconstruction of understandings of what it means to be human, along with the questioning of what language is and what it involves, and the problematization of relations between human and nonhuman entities. In this regard, materiality and discourse are conceived as intertwined. This undertaking is grounded in reflections from postqualitative inquiry and postfoundational frameworks; more specifically, it is characterized as a posthumanist study. For the generation of empirical material, which occurred from August to December (i.e., during one semester), the apparatuses that became part of the study were the following: a) an initial questionnaire; b) classroom intra-actions with the learners, which were filmed, audio recorded, and transcribed; c) students’ activities done throughout the semester; d) reflective and diffractive field notes; and e) intraviews. The discussion of the empirical material is divided into two main topics: sociomateriality of (human) bodies and material-discursive ideologies of language and language education. As posthumanist scholars have pointed out, by and large, academics involved in the humanities and social sciences have often neglected material aspects when it comes to discourse, and because of that my objective is to problematize not simply social aspects (as it has been the focus of critical applied linguistics), but rather sociomaterial ones, based on the events that occurred throughout the study. As unfoldings of this experience, the reflections on bodies, issues of identity, especially class, race and ethnicity, gender, and age presented in this work offer a post-anthropocentric viewpoint from events that the students and I experienced. Regarding language and language education, I discuss the learners’ perceptions, attitudes, and actions as well as my own as material-discursive practices, with a focus on our intra-actions with the classroomscape and technologies, the assessment and tests, and their language learning projects. As I draw on the aforementioned perspectives, I aim to show how matter mattered in this language education experience.