and in which they must take more strategic positions in order to liberate themselves from imposed identities. In this sense, agency is not a property of free and sovereign individuals. Instead, it describes the human capacity not only to resist imposed subject positions but also to make choices and change the course of one's life, create new ways of being, and look for “cultural alternatives” (Pennycook, 1997, p. 35).
Research Into Agency in L2 Learning and Teaching
Prompted by the social turn, empirical studies from social perspectives on agency (often with this word appearing in the title) have investigated L2 learning and teaching, indicating growing interest in the social and complex nature of agency among SLA researchers. Norton's (2000) study used the concept of agency, although she did not use the term “agency” itself. Drawing on Bourdieu (1977) and Weedon (1997), among others, she demonstrated how newcomers to a country are deprived of opportunities to use and practice the L2, or the “right to speech” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 75), even though they are invested in learning the language in order to secure better life opportunities. Based on interviews with five immigrant women as well as their diaries, the study depicted their struggles and their agency in fighting for secure positions in society while learning to claim the right to speak in the L2.
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.
Conclusion
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
References
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