From Material Ruptures to Visceral Adaptations: Reassembling Novice Language Teacher Agency Through a Sociomaterial Lens

Research on language teacher agency has moved beyond static models of professional competence, but studies often foreground teachers’ intentions and beliefs while backgrounding the material conditions of pedagogical action. Informed by sociomaterial scholarship, this ethnographic study explores how novice teachers’ professional agency develops through entanglements among artifacts, spaces, and bodies. It traced two Chinese language teachers’ experiences in Macau through observations, artifacts, and interviews, examining their trajectories diffractively through assemblage, rupture, and affect. Both cases revealed agency as emerging through shifting sociomaterial relations. For Wen, institutional slides and colleagues’ spatial and acoustic intrusions constrained pedagogical flexibility, while a projector malfunction constituted a rupture within which her alliance with the classroom whiteboard afforded improvisational action and redistributed authority. For Yu, professional clothing and delegated affective labor assembled a borrowed teacher persona, but recurring bodily discomfort unsettled this “hollow” performance; her relation to teaching was later reconfigured through embodied cultural knowledge and visceral connection with students. These findings show how agency emerges as pedagogical assemblages shift and how professional development involves growing attunement and broader repertoires for responding within them. The article reconceptualizes competence as situated and relational and calls for heightened awareness of the sociomaterial conditions of teacher development.