| Globalization has influenced the methods used in English language teaching, leading to a transition from instruction focused heavily on human agency to one that incorporates specific materials as resources for learning and meaning-making through physical engagement and nonverbal cues. As a result, educators are re-assessing conventional teaching strategies and looking into creative methods that utilize local resources as educational tools. This research is an ethnographic study centered on exploring the role of language materiality within a developing English class among the Dayaknese students in Kalimantan. The aim is to enhance students' understanding of the embodiment process in meaning-making, bridge language knowledge gaps, and improve language skills relevant to their context. This study employs Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) to examine classroom interactions, embodiment, and the integration of language materiality, along with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to assess the insights of students regarding the use of language materiality in English language teaching classrooms. This research involved 64 students who were in the first grade of junior high school and had never encountered English during elementary school, and 30 students participated in an interview aimed at gathering their perspectives on the integration of language materiality in the classroom. The results show that teacher and students interacted in English class with materiality by commodifying the language which brought the teaching and learning closer to students' reality, transmodal production to understand the word to things or things to word, materializing to link goods and places with a symbolically referenced local to improve a product's uniqueness, transduction made the students used the language more creatively by repeating and adding the word, spelling materiality to objectify words for visual consumption, and transforming with language materiality to describe the alteration from its original form. Furthermore, there is a contribution from embodiment and assemblage in meaning-making since students and the researcher are doing progressive reactions to connect each other. Students' positive responses about the incorporation of language materiality is also proof that language materiality is beneficial to be incorporated in the EFL classroom of the Dayaknese community. |