Learner agency in students’ EFL learning narratives
Learner agency in students’ EFL learning narratives

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the phenomenon of learner agency in the English as a foreign language (henceforth EFL) context. Agency has recently attracted the attention of educational researchers because of the need of our times where the rapid development and social changes require from individuals to take responsibility for their own lives, to make meaning of their experience and learn from that. I will define the phenomenon of agency, as well as briefly introduce a chordal triad model of agency proposed by Emirbayer and Mische (1998). The researchers assume an ecological perspective on human agency and see value in the analysis of one’s life stories. The benefit of such an approach is not only for researchers who can grasp an interplay of various factors also from outside the formal education context which are often ignored by EFL teachers as the ones that have had a real impact on the learners’ competences and their learning process; it is also useful for the learners themselves, as in a way they need to distance themselves from their experience, reflect upon and evaluate it, thus in consequence they will understand themselves better. In the article two Polish student-narratives on their way to English competence were selected and analysed to understand what drives individuals to achieve their EFL goals, what means they apply and what meaning they make of their experiences and reflections. Such an analysis allows identifying different tones of EFL learner agency, which may give us a broader insight into the language learning process itself.

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