Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Approaches
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Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Approaches
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Overview
This book showcases how language learner agency can be understood and researched from varying perspectives by providing, for the first time, a collection of diverse approaches in one volume. The volume is organised into three main sections:the first sections offers an introduction to varying theoretical approaches to agency; the second section presents analyses of agency in a variety of empirical studies; and the third section focuses on the pedagogical implications of data-based studies of agency. The volume includes the work of researchers working in languages including English (ESL and EFL), Greek, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Truku (an indigenous language in Taiwan) and with both child and adult language learners. This collection will serve as a key reference for researchers of language learning and teaching, sociolinguistics and language and identity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783092918 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 12/05/2014 |
| Series: | Second Language Acquisition , #84 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Ping Deters is a Professor in the English Language Institute of Seneca College in Toronto, Canada.
Xuesong (Andy) Gao is an Associate Professor in the Division of English Language Education, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong.
Elizabeth R. Miller is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA.
Gergana Vitanova is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Central Florida, USA.
Xuesong (Andy) Gao is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales. His current research interests are in the areas of learner autonomy, language learning narratives, language education policy, and language teacher education. He is co-editor of System: An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics.
Elizabeth R. Miller (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she is Associate Chair and Director of Undergraduate Programs. Her current research focuses on language teacher identity, agency and emotions and has been published in journals such as Applied Linguistics, TESOL Quarterly, Language Teaching Research, System, and the Modern Language Journal, among others. She has published a monograph and three co-edited volumes with Multilingual Matters and one co-edited volume with Bloomsbury Publishers.
Gergana Vitanova is an Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, USA.
Read an Excerpt
Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning
Interdisciplinary Approaches
By Ping Deters, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Elizabeth R. Miller, Gergana Vitanova
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2015 Ping Deters, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Elizabeth R. Miller, Gergana Vitanova and the authors of individual chaptersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-291-8
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Gergana Vitanova, Elizabeth R. Miller, Xuesong (Andy) Gao and Ping Deters
Agency Situated Historically
This book showcases how language learner agency can be understood and researched from varying perspectives by providing, for the first time, a collection of diverse theoretical, analytic and pedagogical approaches in one volume. The concept of human agency has generated considerable interest across various disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology – for some time, and this scholarly conversation regarding how to understand humans' capacity to act shows no signs of abating soon. While the notions of agency and the self have always seemed inherently intertwined, agency has been far more difficult to define, although it has been viewed, understandably, as one of the many facets of the self. Thus, the idea of agency or our understanding of the nature of humans' capacity for agency has been, to a large extent, determined by historically influential models that explain the nature of the self.
At least four different models of selfhood have emerged and influenced scholars' perspectives regarding what constitutes both subjectivity and agency. The traditional understanding of self (for a summary, see Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010) is largely represented in myths and rituals, and these have helped humans understand the most significant events of their lives, such as birth and death. Body and spirit were viewed as two separate entities in this traditional model, and the spiritual reality was viewed as the higher one. The modernist conception of self was strongly influenced by Enlightenment era perspectives, and it was marked by what Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010: 87) call 'an unprecedented autonomy' with its different forms of individualism. The self was seen not only as possessing an essential and unchanging core but also as independent and rational. Choice and action, which have come to be closely associated with agency, form an important component of this rational, individualistic self. For centuries, or at least ever since Aristotle, agency has also been associated with consciousness. Contemporary philosopher Korsgaard (2009), for example, illustrates the importance of self-awareness for agency in her statement:
The identity of a person, of an agent, is not the same as the identity of the human animal on whom the person normally supervenes. I believe that human beings differ from the other animals in an important way. We are self-conscious of the grounds on which we act, and therefore are in control of them ... When you deliberately decide what sorts of effects you will bring about in the world, you are also deliberately deciding what sort of cause you will be. And that means you are deciding who you are. (Korsgaard, 2009: 19)
Deliberate, conscious choices and actions that are, at the same time, intrinsically moral underlie most Western perspectives on agency. Korgsaard's excerpt also reflects that, for a long time, and in different disciplines, the relationship between agency and identity has been perceived as deeply entangled. Human actions and experience have occupied a central role as well.
When outlining the development of self as subject in psychology, Blasi and Glodis (1995: 416) point out that '[i]n every intentional action that we perform, in every experience that we undergo, we experience ourselves, in the process of acting and experiencing, as related to our actions and experiences' (emphasis in original). Psychologists see the relationship between subjects, actions and experience as organic. Not all acts exemplify human agency, however. Agency requires not merely the ability to produce a change in the world, but also that acts should be knowingly, consciously undertaken by subjects. Thus, reflexivity has emerged as another significant component of agency (Kogler, 2012).
In contrast, in a movement that opposed modernism and came to be known as postmodernism, the self is viewed as decentralized and unstable. Perhaps most importantly in terms of agency, the self appears stripped of its personal autonomy. For instance, feminist poststructuralism (Weedon, 1997), which prefers the term subjectivity to identity and accentuates the discursive, languaged nature of selves, has been employed in applied linguistics exactly because of its focus on how discourses offer various positions for subjects. While there are different postmodern approaches, what characterizes them most broadly is an understanding of the self as constituted through language (Foucault, 1972; Lacan, 1977). Unlike the traditional or modern approaches to selves, postmodernists have emphasized the power structures that underlie human relationships. Yet these approaches are not entirely without their critics. A major point of criticism has been that they espouse a relativistic perspective. Another point of criticism that is more directly related to agency is that, while postmodern approaches take into account the larger, social and institutional structures, the role of the individual remains unclear and somewhat bleak. That said, proponents of performativity theory, aligning with poststructuralism, have argued that, while 'some critics mistake the critique of sovereignty [of the self] for the demolition of agency ... agency begins where sovereignty wanes' (Butler, 1997: 16). Rather than claiming that subjectivity is 'only language', these scholars have argued that discourse provides the 'epistemological condition' by which we come to know and understand the world and to view ourselves as human actors who are able to act in that world (Vasterling, 1999: 21).
Sociocultural perspectives have been proposed as an alternative to other approaches to the self exactly because of their focus on the complex interactions between individuals and communities, on the one hand, and human cognition and experience on the other. Instead of conceiving selves and agency as individual or autonomous phenomena, sociocultural approaches view them as the result of inter-subjective processes. Largely inspired by Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (1978) and Bakhtin's dialogism (1981, 1984), such perspectives have foregrounded the mediated essence of agency. Psychologists Werstsch et al. (1993), for example, argue for redefining the boundaries of agency as they borrow Bateson's (1972) famous affirmation that 'agency extends beyond the skin' (Bateson, cited in Wertsch et al., 1993: 337). Very much like cognition, which is understood to be socially mediated, agency too is regarded as developing in relation to social groups, not as a property of individuals. Language itself, as one of the key mediational means along with the processes of language learning, is regarded as intrinsically social as well.
In cultural anthropology, Holland et al. (1998) have employed Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's ideas and applied them to explaining the development of identities and agency. These scholars reject traditional Western conceptions of essential individuals by suggesting, instead, that humans act as socially constructed selves, who 'are subject to positioning by whatever powerful discourses they happen to encounter' (Holland et al., 1998: 27). Holland et al. underscore that our identities are sociohistorical constructions and that the symbols of mediation that humans use are produced in active collaboration with other actors. This interdependent nature of agency is summarized in Inden's (1990) definition, which Holland and her colleagues have adopted in their work:
[Agency is] the realized capacity of people to act upon their world and not only to know about or give personal or intersubjective significance to it. That capacity is the power of people to act purposefully and reflectively, in more or less complex interrelationships with one another, to reiterate and remake the world in which they live, in circumstances where they may consider different courses or action possible and desirable, though not necessarily from the same point of view. (Cited in Holland et al., 1998: 42)
People's capacity to act purposefully and reflectively as they engage in relationships with other human beings in turn prompts human beings to re-invent their own positions or re-imagine how they can act. Such a perspective seems to constitute the core of what most contemporary scholars believe about agency. In an often-cited article, linguistic anthropologist Ahearn (2001: 112) offers a provisional definition of agency that is not dissimilar from the definition above: 'Agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act'. As this definition suggests, language plays a central role in current thought on agency. Ahearn explains that linguistic anthropology views language as a type of social action. As she reviews different approaches to agency, she recommends that scholars be careful in how they conceptualize this construct and cautions against one-sided definitions. Instead of one form of agency, Ahearn proposes that perhaps different types should be considered and explored, for instance, oppositional agency, complicit agency or agency and intention, while keeping in mind that these different types of agency may actually overlap during any given action.
Agency and Second Language Acquisition
These approaches to agency, identity and the self have been reflected in the fields of applied linguistics and second language acquisition, and as in other disciplines, one can trace a shift from an essentialist perspective to language learning to one that regards language acquisition as a complex socially embedded phenomenon. While the term agency itself was not used in early second language research, kernels of the understanding that learners can act purposefully and have some control over their own learning were expressed in some early research such as in the Good Language Learner Model (Rubin, 1975) and in research on individual learner characteristics (e.g. motivation). Successful learners were portrayed as active learners who possess both intrinsic motivation and autonomy (Ushioda, 2003).
A different body of research, however, largely based on postmodern models of language and identity, has emerged, arguing for the need to acknowledge that second language learning, like other activities, is ultimately a socially mediated process. Such scholars have introduced identity to second language acquisition (McKay & Wong, 1996; Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2000; Toohey & Norton, 2001). They have stressed the significance of the hierarchy in power relations within different discourses and have underscored that second language learners cannot be viewed as independent from these power structures. Norton, for example, in her work with female immigrants, has rejected the term motivation and, instead, proposed investment because the latter illustrates more closely how learners relate to their social environments and to others in their realities. Instead of investigating motivation or individual learner characteristics, these scholars have explored how second language speakers or writers negotiate social positions and power through the use of discourses. The active use of discourses and addressing power relations through language become an aspect of learner agency. Relatedly, scholars who have articulated the relevance of Activity Theory for understanding second language learning have stressed the relational aspect of agency for second language learners. Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001: 148), for example, contend that 'agency is never a property of the individual but a relationship that is constantly constructed and renegotiated with those around the individual and with society at large'.
Although addressed by second language scholars only in the past decade and half, learner agency is increasingly regarded as a fundamental construct in language-learning processes and for language-learner identities (van Lier, 2008). This growing emphasis on learner agency reflects the broader shift in second language research to exploring learners as complex individuals whose language use, meaning-making and actions are mediated by their social and cultural worlds. In summarizing existing research, van Lier (2008) claims that there are three central characteristics when it comes to agency in language classrooms: the learner's ability to self-regulate, the socially mediated nature of sociocultural context and an awareness of one's responsibility for one's own acts. Although van Lier does not specify it directly, ethics or moral responsibility is an important part of both the modern approaches to agency and Bakhtin's (1984) dialogical framework of the self. Importantly, agency does not always imply active participation by learners in the classroom. Canagarajah (1999) has demonstrated how students can resist discourses in a Sri Lanka classroom and they, thus, employ agency by not participating actively in the classroom as a form of resistance.
As attention to agency has grown and developed in second language scholarship, the approaches adopted and the definitions offered point to diversity rather than uniform understandings of learner agency. In fact, the individual research of the four editors of this volume demonstrates this quite vividly. Deters (2011) examines the interrelationship between identity and agency from a social psychological perspective, drawing upon Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of mind, Lave and Wenger's community of practice framework, and Erikson's psychoanalytic theory of identity. According to this perspective, agency is seen as comprising an individual aspect that is based on the sociocultural history as well as a situated aspect that is context-specific and co-constructed. In addition, Deters uses Erikson's work on the psychological need for identity coherence to make the connection between agency and identity.
Drawing on Margaret Archer's (2003) theorization of 'internal conversation', Gao (2013) conceptualizes language learners' agency as a precondition to learners' efforts to take charge of the learning process. He proposes that close examination of language-learners' reflexive/reflective thinking helps reveal how agency enables them to discern and deliberate on their concerns, desires and visions in the light of contextual and structural conditions before their commitment to particular learning paths (see also Gao, 2010). Miller (2012, 2014) foregrounds the fundamentally mediated and relational aspect of learner agency. To that end, she draws on Vygotsky's notion of semiotic mediation and Bakhtin's concept of dialogic mediation along with research exploring the mediating effects of language ideologies for learner agency. However, her primary theoretical framing is informed by Butler's (1997) performativity theory. Finally, Vitanova (2010) adopts a dialogical, Bakhtinian (1981) framework in exploring how agency is enacted in everyday contexts. Drawing on the experiences of adult immigrants and second language learners, her work suggests a discourse-centered approach to the analysis of narrative as a genre in the field of applied linguistics. Agency, in this context, is portrayed as a creative, responsive and even ethical understanding of one's sociocultural realities.
This volume was developed in light of the increasing importance of the concept of agency in current scholarship in second language learning. In addition, we regard interdisciplinarity as necessary for developing better understandings of agency in second language learning research, and we regard the lack of a single definition for agency as inevitable. Joseph (2006: 240), in fact, argues that 'no single model is adequate' for understanding agency in the larger context of applied linguistics research and contends that what researchers really need to focus on is 'who has and lacks it in what contexts, and to devise ways of restoring it to those genuinely most deprived of it' (Joseph, 2006: 239). We therefore see strength in bringing together a collection of theoretical essays and empirical studies that approach learner agency from a variety of frameworks and approaches.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning by Ping Deters, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Elizabeth R. Miller, Gergana Vitanova. Copyright © 2015 Ping Deters, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Elizabeth R. Miller, Gergana Vitanova and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
1. Gergana Vitanova, Elizabeth R. Miller, Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Ping Deters: Introduction to Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Section I. Theoretical Approaches to Agency
2. David Block: Structure, Agency, Individualization and the Critical Realist Challenge
3. Hannele Dufva and Mari Aro: Dialogical View on Language Learners’ Agency: Connecting Intrapersonal with Interpersonal
4. Patricia A. Duff and Liam Doherty: Examining Agency in (Second) Language Socialization Research
5. Chatwara Suwannamai Duran: Theorizing Young Language Learner Agency through the Lens of Multilingual Repertoires: A Socio-Cultural Perspective
6. Carola Mick: Sociological Approaches to Second Language Learning and Agency
Section II. Analytical Approaches to Investigating Agency
7. Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta: Agency, Agents and Artifacts. Accounting Practices and Identity Performances
8. Hayriye Kayi-Aydar: “He’s the Star!”: Positioning as a Tool of Analysis to Investigate Agency and Access to Learning Opportunities in a Classroom Environment
9. Adnan Ajsic: ‘Crossing’ into the L2 and Back: Agency and Ultimate Attainment by a Post-Critical Period Learner
10. Peter William Stanfield: Analyzing Learner Agency: a Place-Based Approach
Section III. Pedagogical Practices for Agency
11. Christina Gkonou: Agency, Anxiety, and Activity: Understanding the Classroom Behaviour of EFL Learners
12. Próspero N. García: Verbalizing in the Second Language Classroom: Exploring the Role of Agency in the Internalization of Grammatical Categories
13. Theron Muller: Critical Discourse Analysis in a Medical English Course: Examining Learner Agency through Student Written Reflections
14. Man-Chiu Amay Lin: Towards a Relationship-Oriented Framework: Revisiting Agency by Listening to the Voices of Children
15. Anna de Fina: Afterword