Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

A recent example following this line of research is Miller's (2014) study of immigrant small business owners in the USA, which showed how their agency was discursively exercised (or not) while they were learning and using an additional language in their everyday lives. Also, studies on agency in instructed foreign language (FL) settings (e.g., Gao, 2010; Mercer, 2011) are appearing. Aro's (2016) longitudinal study followed the long, winding development of agency in two Finnish learners of English for 12 years in both instructed and uninstructed settings. An anthology aiming to theorize and analyze agency in SLA (Deters, Gao, Miller, & Vitanova, 2015) containing 13 separate studies showcases researchers' initiatives to enlist a wide range of theoretical perspectives in order to understand agency in SLA. Theories range from sociocultural approaches, including Bahktin's dialogism (with a chapter by Dufva & Aro), language socialization (Duff & Doherty), and positioning theories (Kayi‐Aydar) to poststructural, postcolonial viewpoints (Bagga‐Gupta on women working in nonprofit organizations in Mumbai as well as Lin on Taiwanese indigenous language education), and critical realism presented by Block as a new theoretical perspective for exploring structure and agency. Authors represented in this volume chose discourse analysis and ethnography as their preferred methods for examining agency as negotiated in discourse, while new methodological possibilities are also explored, including autoethnography and linking linguistic and interview data. Separately, many studies discuss how agency is exercised differently by the same person in different contexts, for example, instructed versus community (Miller, 2014) or changing positions vis‐à‐vis others in the classroom (Kayi‐Aydar, 2015b). Kashiwa and Benson's study (2017) of Chinese students in a study‐abroad context also highlights how environmental constraints and affordances change how learners exercise agency.

Another notable recent trend is an increase in research into teacher agency from broadly social perspectives (e.g., Ruohotie‐Lyhty, 2011; Feryok, 2012; Kayi‐Aydar, 2015a, 2015b; White, 2018; Ishihara, Carroll, Mahler, & Russo, 2018). With an increased understanding of how teachers' exercise of agency is linked to how effective they can be in instructional conditions (Kayi‐Aydar, 2015a), language teachers' agency has attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners. From this perspective, teacher agency is viewed as a complex concept influenced by various factors, such as how teachers view their students, themselves as teachers, education in general, their own profession, and the professional relationships that are formed within their particular environment (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2013). In an anthology dedicated to this theme (Ng & Boucher‐Yip, 2017), researchers focus on how a language teacher's agency structures and is structured by the curricular policy and education reform imposed by the government. With teachers being the agents who negotiate, accept, or deny, and introduce educational policy into the classroom by converting these into instructional practices, studying how teachers both translate and implement policies in actual classrooms and what effects their ways of doing so have on their teaching is shown to be useful in understanding the language‐learning classroom.

The concept of agency has been appropriated by SLA researchers working from different theoretical perspectives, resulting in various implications for L2 learning and teaching. Within the sociocultural framework, agency refers to one's capacity to act through the mediation of culturally created tools as well as with guidance by more capable others rather than to a property of individual learners. Thus, teachers' and co‐learners' involvement is regarded as crucial in offering mediation—or scaffolding—to learners in their zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1997), which will lead to self‐regulation and independence. From an activity theory perspective, learning an L2 is equal to participating in a community, where the L2 mediates the learner's involvement in new activities and in forming new social relationships in the community.

From a poststructural or critical perspective, socially, culturally, and politically engaged forms of L2 teaching that can help learners exercise agency are called for because, as Pennycook (1997) argues, learning a language is more than mastering a system; it is also a matter of “struggling to find means of articulation amid the cultures, discourses, and ideologies within which we live our lives” (pp. 48–9). L2 teaching should therefore “help students become authors of their own worlds” (p. 45).

In a globalizing society, in which people increasingly move around the globe for many different reasons and where information technology brings people together in virtual worlds, people's movements and communication often involve second language learning and the reconstruction of selves. Individuals are not entirely free in how they choose ways of life or identities because they are embedded in social structures that constrain their freedom. Yet, as humans face a variety of choices and constraints, their agency is becoming a key concept for people living in the present world, particularly those who try to craft new identities by learning a second language.

SEE ALSO:Identity and Second Language Acquisition; Motivation in Second Language Acquisition; Vygotsky and Second Language Acquisition

1 Ahearn, L. (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 109–37.

2 Aro, M. (2016). In action and inaction: English learners authoring their agency. In P. Kalaja, A. F. Barcelos, M. Aro, & M. Ruohotie‐Lyhty (Eds.), Beliefs, agency, and identity in foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 48–66). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

3 Block, D. (2003). The social turn in second language acquisition. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

4 Block, D. (2007). Second language identities. London, England: Continuum.

5 Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice ( R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

6 Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the supervision of identity. London, England: Routledge.

7 Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of B. F. Skinner's verbal behavior. Language, 35, 26–58.

8 Deters, P., Gao, X., Miller, E. R., & Vitanova, G. (2015). Theorizing and analyzing agency in second language learning: Interdisciplinary approaches. Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters.

9 Feryok, A. (2012). Activity theory and language teacher agency. Modern Language Journal, 96(1), 95–107.

10 Gao, X. (2010). Strategic language learning: The roles of agency and context. Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters.

11 Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Oxford, England: Polity.

12 Ishihara, N., Carroll, S. K., Mahler, D., & Russo, A. (2018). Finding a niche in teaching English in Japan: Translingual practice and teacher agency. System, 79, 81–90. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2018.06.006

13 Kashiwa, M., & Benson, P. (2017). A road and a forest: Conceptions of in‐class and out‐of‐class learning in the transition to study abroad. TESOL Quarterly, 52(4), 725–47. doi: 10.1002/tesq.409

14 Kayi‐Aydar, H. (2015a). “He's the star!”: Positioning as a tool of analysis to investigate agency and access to learning opportunities in a classroom environment. In P. Deters, X. Gao, E. R. Miller, & G. Vitanova (Eds.), Theorizing and analyzing agency in second language learning: Interdisciplinary approaches (pp. 133–53). Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters.