Resumen de Analyzing the implementation and effects of an agency-based communicative pedagogical approach in the foreign language classroom
Nowadays, we still witness many foreign language classrooms where traditional teaching methods do not enable students to further expand their communicative development. The aim of the sociocultural theory is “to develop a fully agentive being; one that is maximally able to not only adapt to the world but to change it through conscious intentional activity” (Lantolf, 2013, p.27). Although various authors plead for the inclusion of agency in the classroom to achieve this (Lantolf, 2013; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Mercer, 2011, 2012; Stetsenko, 2017), there is neither a widely-accepted definition of agency, nor an informed pedagogical proposal of how this can be achieved.
The aim of this study is to create an informed agency-based communicative pedagogical approach, and to analyze its implementation and effects. The intention of the analysis is to understand how the approach promotes learners’ use of the new language through their agency. The approach has been adopted over one scholastic year with eleven secondary level students attending an English extracurricular class in Barcelona, Spain. The data that has been collected consists of interviews with the students, audiovisual recordings from the lessons, guidelines from the communicative events, and a teaching diary.
A sociocultural psychology research methodology has been chosen to closely follow and analyze the development of four students. First of all, the interviews focusing on their interpretation and experience of the designed social environment have been analyzed through qualitative content analysis. Secondly, the recordings from three different communicative events during the course have been analyzed, with a focus on agentive behavior through agency-based classroom discourse analysis. Finally, their personal agentive development has been established through temporal analysis (Mercer, 2008). Afterwards, the interconnections between the results from all students’ temporal analyses indicated how the created agency-based communicative pedagogical approach had transformed their self-regulated activity over the course.
The findings of this study indicate that there are two main reasons why the designed approach has promoted agentive use of the foreign language: a co-constructed environment built on trust, and the students’ positive self-beliefs that have developed through reflective action-oriented learning (Esteve, Fernández, Martín-Peris, & Atienza, 2017). The element of trust and the positive self-beliefs the students experienced as a result of the designed approach have promoted their use of the foreign language, and enhanced their agency. Based on the conclusions, a tool-and-result pedagogy has been created as a discussion point on how to promote agentive use of the foreign language.
