Building language from intra-actions in English classes

The objective of this article is to discuss some events from a language education experience, while drawing on a critical posthumanist perspective to do so. In the second semester of 2019, six students had English classes with the first author at a private language school in Goiânia, a capital in the Central West region of Brazil. Their course generated empirical material for her doctoral dissertation. The arguments presented in this piece are grounded in conceptions of language as sociomaterial practice. Thus, we seek not just to expand but reconfigure understandings of language and what it involves, especially in the classroom, by disrupting the humanist and anthropocentric relation between humans and language. This study is characterized as postqualitative inquiry, not relying on methods, approaches, and procedures. Alternatively, this Deleuzoguattarian framework draws on concepts, which wash over inquirers, redirecting their thoughts and actions. Although the generation of empirical material involved several apparatuses, given the limited space and the need for a more in-depth discussion, we bring into the fold just some of them here. Information from an initial questionnaire is mentioned and some field notes are presented, but our analysis primarily focuses on video-recorded classroom intra-actions with the students who took part in this study, accompanied by movement-images intended to provide a better picture of the agential cuts made for this article. As we address understandings of language, we aim to show how semiotic resources, especially bodily performances, construct sense-making in localized, situated landscapes permeated by material-discursive practices.