Learner agency and its types; application in the language learning environment

Abstract

The article examines student agency as the student’s resource or asset that influences the formation of an individual learning path in foreign language acquisition. Two types of resources are identified: personal – individual characteristics of the student’s intellectual cognitive development, acquired skills, knowledge – and external, economic and social resource, – social, family and educational environment as well as networks. The influence of changes taking place in the learning environment, in particular in language acquisition, and the impact of transformational competencies on the formation and development of agency, student agency, and co-agency are highlighted. Sociological and socio-psychological approaches to defining the concept of agency and the different contexts in which student agency is formed and developed – moral, social, economic, and creative – are outlined. Student agency is defined as an initiative, conscious, self-regulated activity of students aimed at choosing their own learning path in order to achieve personal goals. The types of co-agency within the educational ecosystem are considered; four levels of systemic interaction of educational process stakeholders are distinguished: student-teacher, student-peer, student-family, and student- wider community, and their influence on the formation and development of student agency is emphasized. Based on the theory of structuration and metacognitive strategies that learners favour in the process of organizing language acquisition, the types of student agency used in the language learning environment are differentiated: collaborative, technological, culture-oriented, research, reflexive, self-directed, and action-oriented. The prospect for further research consists in establishing a correlation between the types of student agency and learning tasks in the language classroom