ES agencia / CAT agència / FR agentivité / DE Agentivität

Agency is the ability to direct one’s own learning process. It includes action control, initiative, and decision-making. The learner is conceived as a social, intercultural, autonomous agent, who constructs meanings in the new additional language. It is the concept of language user proposed in the CEFR (2001 and 2018):

The CEFR presents the language user/learner as a ‘social agent’, acting in the social world and exerting agency in the learning process. This implies a real paradigm shift in both course planning and teaching, promoting learner engagement and autonomy (MCER 2018: 28).

Based on the ideas of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu, cultural anthropology studies the processes through which the people, socially and culturally situated in the world with a given identity (Holland et al., 1988), establish themselves as agent subjects in that world. Activity theory explains agency as something more than just acting, since it links it to the use of language; thanks to agency, people develop a critical attitude, so they are able to analyze with their own criteria their life’s circumstances and try to change them, enriching them and diversifying their identity. “[Agency is] constantly coconstructed and renegotiated with those around the individual and with the society at large” (Lantolf & Pavlenko 2001: 148).

The sociocultural theory of learning studies how language learners negotiate agency while taking part in social interactions. This requires the development of a self-regulating ability, using the constructed linguistic knowledge, which is relevant to the individual’s communicative purposes. Attending agency in language learning implies fostering a linguistic awareness in learners that allows them to select and adapt the verbal resources at their disposal according to their interests and purposes (van Lier 2008).

References

• Ahern, Laura (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30: 109-137.
• Holland, Dorothy; Lachicotte Jr., William; Skinner, Debra & Cain, Carole. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Lantolf, James P. &Pavlenko, Aneta (2001). (S)econd (L)anguage (A)ctivity Theory: Understanding second language learners as people. En Michael Breen (Ed.), Learner contributions to language learning. New directions in research, 141-158. Londres: Longman.
• Van Lier, Leo (2008). Agency in the classroom. En Lantolf, J. & Poehner, M.E., Sociocultural Theory and the Teaching of Second Languages. Londres: Equinox.