AGENCY IN LANGUAGE LEARNING
CHAPTER 5
CONTENT
 What is agency?
 Approaches to understanding agency
Agency and Self- efficacy
Agency, Rewards and Motivation
Agency and Embodiment
Cognition, Emotion and Agency
Agency in Sociopolitical Context
 Enacting the Principle of Agency in L2 Classroom
What is agency?
 Agency is the key to understanding who language
learners are and why they think and act the way they
do.
 It is the basis for making sense of the complexity of
classroom practices, reflecting on those practices, and
organizing them into a coherent system.
APPROACHES TO
UNDERSTANDING AGENCY
 In this section we introduce various theoretical
approaches to examining human agency that have
influenced SLA and language education over the last
few decades. Also, there are many constructs related to
agency that have been extensively researched, such as
self-efficacy, motivation, self-regulation, autonomy,
and identity.
How does self-efficacy affect
learner agency?
American psychologist Albert Bandura conducted
extensive research on human agency particularly
through the examination of self-efficacy.
 He defines self-efficacy as an individual's perceptions
of "one's capabilities to organize and execute the
courses of action required to produce given
attainments"
 Agency ;
 motivates, monitors, and regulates individuals'
execution of decisions made and actions planned.
 also enables individuals to examine their
metacognitive capability to reflect on the adequacy of
one's thoughts and actions
For understanding this anticipatory self-guidance of
human agency, the notion of self-efficacy is relevant.
Agency, Rewards, and Motivation
 Motivation can be defined as "the anticipation of
reinforcement." There is no question that a large
portion of what we do is motivated by an anticipated
reward.
 Considering the principle of reward discussed ,we
may wonder what causes language learners to be
driven to act on learning and how one can sustain such
drive. Understanding the role of agency in human
motivation may give us insight into such questions.
 Intrinsically motivated actions derive from the desire of a
person to accomplish something for his or her own
pleasure, while external motivators, designed to control a
person, can pressure a person to think, feel, or behave in a
specific way.
For classroom teachers, intrinsic motivation is important
because it is a crucial element in the cognitive, social, and
physical development of humans, and leads to high-quality
learning.
More autonomous intrinsic motivation is associated
with greater engagement, better performance, less dropping
out, higher quality learning, and greater psychological wellbeing, among other outcomes.
 Ushioda notes that L2 motivation is dynamic and can be
mediated socially. It has strong relationship with learner
identity and agency ,because one's sense of identity and
agency depends on actions carried out not only on his or
her own but also under the control of others (e.g., peers and
teachers)
 Dörnyei and Ushioda have called for capturing a complex
dynamic systems perspective on L2 learner motivation
rather than the positivist psychometric cause-effect
approach to what "moves" L2 students to learn. In Lamb's
study, for example, L2 learners were highly motivated but
exercised their agency to choose to be a speaker of English
as a lingua franca rather than to be a member of
communities of English native speakers as assumed in the
traditional notion of integrative motivation
Agency and Embodiment
"learning by doing is the best way to learn,"
In particular, we draw on the notion of embodied
cognition, also known as situated cognition, to discuss
the relationship between the mind and action and how
this relationship can be relevant to human agency.
 All human learning begins "not with a sensory
stimulus, but with a sensorimotor co-ordination
 Making sense of perceptual experience and response
happens as the individuals engage in the very action.
 Perception and embodied action are inseparable
 Agency can manifest in the active process of
perceptual learning, that is, learning to perceive
particular features and meanings (affordances) in the
environment. Individuals' perception of affordances is
relative to the perceiving object.
 In other words, agency is a prerequisite of "real"
learning, involving cognition, emotion, and physical
movement in a sociocultural, historically situated
context.
 Taking a sociocognitive approach to SLA, Atkinson
(2011) views cognition as adaptive intelligence, which
is "an open biological system to align with the
environment“
 This alignment with the environment takes on agency
because ;
From this point of view learning is more about
figuring out how to align oneself with the social world
than extracting knowledge from it.
Cognition, Emotion, and Agency
 When agency means the ability to take action with
intentionality, it is important to understand how the brain
works when an individual takes such an action, what roles
the brain plays in taking further actions, and what that
action does to the brain in response.
 In particular, recent advances in neurology suggest that
cognitive processes such as learning, attention, memory,
and decision-making are greatly affected by the processes
of emotion. In other words, emotion plays a fundamental
role in reasoning and decision-making
 Based on the findings from the studies with brain-damaged
people, Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007) propose an
important hypothesis for education: that is, emotion plays a
critical role in "bringing previously acquired knowledge to
inform real-world decision making in social contexts" In
other words, emotion is a critical factor for the maximum
transfer of acquired knowledge to novel situations and for
helping learners decide when and how to apply what they
have learned previously.
 This is also a crucial point for the principle of agency.
Emotion is what makes people enable to engage in
sound decision making with a repertoire of know-how
and actions that would allow people to respond
appropriately in different social situations.
 To ignore the importance of students' emotions is to
fail to appreciate a critical force in students' learning,
which, in turn, is to "fail to appreciate the very reason
that students learn at all"
Agency in a Sociopolitical Context
 Learner agency in a sociopolitical context and its
importance in language education are strongly
connected with how language learners have
traditionally been viewed in mainstream SLA research.
 The language learners' multiple social roles identities,
unique characteristics, and agency were considered to
be of less importance to our understanding of SLA.
 Agency has been a popular concept for L2 researchers
who aim to understand learner autonomy in situated
L2 learning and how the learners' roles as social beings
shape their learning paths.
 L2 learning takes place as learners increase their
participation in target communities of practice in
which their engagement can be facilitated or
constrained. In these studies, learner agency refers to
"learners' ability to make choices, take control, selfregulate and pursue their goals as individuals"
 Unequal relations of power between language learners and
target language speakers often are the center of the
discussion
 According to Norton, learners invest in learning a target
language hoping that they will acquire certain types of
symbolic andmaterial resources that will promote their
social, political, and economic status in their communities
of practice.
 Understanding learner agency within the identity approach
to SLA is useful for explaining how some seemingly
intelligent and highly motivated students would not want to
speak/write or cannot speak/write in a classroom or a
particular community of practice.
 L2 learners may exert their agency by resisting
identities imposed on them and striving for
constructing a new one.
ENACTING THE PRINCIPLES
AGENCY IN L2 CLASSROOMS
 Encourage learners to "do" language.
 Allow learners' voice to develop.
 Promote the development of affordances (action possibilities).
 Offer opportunities for perceptual learning.
 Guide students to develop self-regulating strategies.
 Treat students as "persons in context".
THANK YOU..
CEREN KAYA
17210510013