Learner agency within the design of an EAP course

Abstract

To meet the demands of today’s society and working life, higher education should support the development of learner agency. How the agency of individual learners emerges in university courses and what kind of agency empowers the learners to face new challenges should be considered. In this article, the focus is on learner agency enabled and expressed on a higher education language course. One learner’s experiences of a blended English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course are explored and used to examine the design of the course. The data reveal that the learner’s views of language-use categories and of herself as a language user emerged as central parts of her agency. Although the learner was, in many respects, an active agent on the course, she seemed to be restricted by the assumed expectations of academic language use. Thus, empowering agency was not expressed within the course design. The Design-Based Research (DBR) approach employed in the study enables changes to the learning design to better support the development of empowering agency. Examples of such changes include discussing different learner positions on academic courses and supporting learners’ reflections on the relevance of the course. DBR as a strategy to support teachers’ agency is also discussed.