Multiliteracies and Student-Created Materials Design: Learner Engagement and Agency in the EFL Classroom

Materials design is widely viewed as the purview of teachers, publishers, and curriculum experts given its pivotal role in the English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom. However, such a belief can lead to social and cultural inequity when we consider how narrow, prescriptive, and standardized ELT materials can be. What they often promote is a Western-centric, monomodal idea of English, which misleadingly points to a level of consistency and conformity in native speaker English that can never be justified. Such materials fail to account for the global proliferation of English and its dynamic use in various technology-mediated communication. This chapter examines how secondary school students in India, Nepal, Malaysia, and Indonesia were facilitated to design their own personally relevant ELT materials via a regional project that leveraged students' out-of-school literacies and cultural capital through a focus on multiliteracies. Our findings revealed that the learners' communication practices were constrained by conventional approaches to material design. The findings also highlighted that students, given the opportunity, could communicate their ideas in symbolically rich ways that empower them and grant them agency.