Enhancing language students’ agency in the “wild”

Abstract

Present-day language learners operate in complex contexts characterized by globalization, the mobility of people and resources, and technology. There is a need to enhance students’ agency, meaning how they use the resources of their environment in navigating it (see, e.g., Biesta & Tedder, 2007), by incorporating students’ everyday interactions in the wild in language classrooms (Wagner, 2015).

This presentation draws on the dissertation project I conducted as a teacher-researcher to examine US university-level Finnish students’ learning in the wild. As a methodological approach, I drew on Scollon and Scollon’s (2004) nexus analysis which allowed me to focus on changing classroom practices. I traced the different cycles of discourse (interaction order, historical body, discourses in place) that intersect the students’ social actions in the wild, and their subsequent reflections. The data comes from an Independent Use Portfolio task and the central question was: How can classroom practices be changed to support student agency in their learning in the wild?

The findings indicate that student agency can be supported by incorporating the digital wilds into the classroom (Sauro & Zourou, 2019). Teachers can promote new classroom interaction orders that center on student initiative, decision-making, and expertise. Through incorporating reflection in classroom practices, students can be encouraged to recognize the impact of their historical bodies on their agency. Considering discourses in place, new practices could be developed to help students tame the wild, strengthen their social connections, and make them reimagine familiar spaces as language learning spaces.