Learner agency within the design of an EAP course
Seppälä, R. (2015). Learner agency within the design of an EAP course. In J. Jalkanen, E. Jokinen, & P. Taalas (Eds.), Voices of pedagogical development : expanding, enhancing and exploring higher education language learning (pp. 197-222). Research-publishing.net. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2015.000293
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Date
2015Copyright
© 2015 by Research-publishing.net (collective work). Author. All articles in this collection are published under the Attribution-NonCommercial -NoDerivatives 4.0
International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Under this licence, the contents are freely available online (as PDF
files) for anybody to read, download, copy, and redistribute provided that the author(s), editorial team, and
publisher are properly cited. Commercial use and derivative works are, however, not permitted.
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.
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Research-publishing.netISBN
978-1-908416-25-4Parent publication ISBN
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Voices of pedagogical development : expanding, enhancing and exploring higher education language learning
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http://dx.doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2015.000293Publication in research information system
https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/24883162
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2015 by Research-publishing.net (collective work). Author. All articles in this collection are published under the Attribution-NonCommercial -NoDerivatives 4.0
International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Under this licence, the contents are freely available online (as PDF
files) for anybody to read, download, copy, and redistribute provided that the author(s), editorial team, and
publisher are properly cited. Commercial use and derivative works are, however, not permitted.
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