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Chapter 2 Literature Review
Embarking the Exploration of the Reality and the Theory
As mentioned above, learners in Taiwan are exposed to English education when very little, and nowadays there are a variety of access for learners to learn English. To explore Erin’s employment of agency while encountering different contexts, I shall first explain what I mean by context and sketch two main English learning contexts relevant to my participant’s story, i.e., English learning domestically and
internationally. The former includes school and private language institutes, whereas the latter refers to study abroad experiences. The last part of the review is the agency framework that I use to interpret the participant’s story.
Context
Context itself is a difficult term to define. The present research considers the term context within ecological perspective (van Lier, 2004) that context stretches from more micro to more macro levels; the former refers to immediate family context while the latter indicates the sociocultural beliefs and attitudes (Mercer, 2016). With the understanding of the term, context shall not be seen as “a bounded, monolithic, static system” but a “dynamic, multifaceted system interconnected simultaneously with many other contextual systems” (Mercer, 2016, p. 14). The individual is thus situated in multilayered contexts, experiencing change and development across time.
To elaborate on the interaction between self and contexts, van Dijk (2004) contents that “contexts are not ‘objective,’ but subjective. (p. 5),” stressing that human agency is the key to how human beings “make meaning out of our
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environments and behaviors and integrate these into our sense of self” (Mercer, 2016, p. 5). In other words, individuals not only form their understandings of the contexts but also make sense of the language and the meaning of language learning differently in the contexts.
In the following, I briefly discuss what it is like to learning English in Taiwanese context and what have found on study abroad.
What is it like to learn English in Taiwan?
In this section, I provide an overview of formal English education in Taiwan, the phenomenon of cram schooling, and research on study abroad.
Formal English Education in Taiwanese Schools
Su (2006) gave a detailed review of the development of English instruction in Taiwan. English instruction in Taiwan began early in 1949. At that time, students started to study English in secondary school, spending six hours per week during 20-week semesters in each school year. The school curricula mainly focused on students’ reading and writing skills, and the instruction centered on the
grammar-translation method.
In 1993 and 1994, a new English curriculum for junior and senior high schools was launched by the Ministry of Education. The focus of English learning shifted from the training of fours skills to communicative competence, and
communication-oriented teaching became the primary principle for teachers’ teaching practice as well as the guideline for textbook developers. With Grade 1-9 Curriculum
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Guidelines (1999, MOE), the goal of teaching English stressed the importance of oral and written communication and cultural awareness. The specific objectives included (1) improving students’ basic communicative competence in reading, writing, speaking and listening and being able to apply the four skills in real contexts, (2) cultivating students’ interests in and approaches to English learning to develop learning autonomy, and (3) enhancing students’ knowledge of local and foreign cultures and customs so that they can compare and respect cultural variations (1999, MOE, p.1). In sum, the new curriculum guidelines emphasize more on developing fluency through meaningful contexts instead of accuracy and rote memorization.
Although there have been tremendous changes in both curriculum guideline and textbook development, test-oriented attitude still prevails even up to this day and has great impact on teaching practice. Lectures and textbook reading are still the main classroom activities and a variety of in-class quizzes take place very frequently.
Students’ ultimate goal is the nationwide entrance examination, while one of the teachers’ most important goals is to help students prepare for and pass the examination.
Not only did the curriculum guideline change, but the age of learners to start English education has been lowered. Since 1990, a growing number of parents and educators felt an urgent need to promote English learning at the elementary level, based on the belief that “the earlier children start to learn English, the higher the proficiency level they will achieve” (Su, 2006, p. 266). In 2001, students in the fifth grade were required to take English classes, and the age was further lowered to grade three in 2002.
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English is still a required course even during college. Most college students need to study English for one to two years. In some universities, students will be asked to pass at least one authorized English test, such as TOEIC or GEPT2, as a requirement for graduation.
Out of the School Context: The Phenomenon of Cram Schooling
One of the most popular English learning contexts out of the school is cram schooling, which is prevalent in Asian countries, especially in Taiwan and Japan.
Chung (2013) defined cram schools as “specialized fee-paying private schools that provide intensive courses of specific subjects to train tutees to enhance their academic ability or professional competence” (p. 585). Liu (2009) reported that the percentage of students who go to cram school from primary to senior high is respectively 70%, 72.9%, and 75.6%. Students go to cram schools with the aim to promote their academic performances, mostly on subjects like science, English, and math, and to prepare the entrance exams. Even for college students, nearly 30% of them will choose cram schools in preparation for the entrance exams to graduate school. Lin and Huang (2006) stated that “cram schooling is a popular social costume;” it is part of the social culture. This phenomenon will remain despite of the high enrollment ratio or the multi-phased entrance program.
According to Tsai and Kuo (2007), there are at least 5,000 cram schools that offer after-school classes in Taiwan. The researchers generally classified cram schools into three categories: skill-oriented cram schools providing classes of music, dancing
2 GEPT stands for The General English Proficiency Test, an English proficiency test developed and administrated by the language training and testing center (LTTC) in Taiwan.
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or home economics that help students develop certain skills; private language schools which offer classes of different languages, and academically-oriented cram schools.
For the third type of cram schools, the focus is mainly on improving students’
academic performance on mathematics, science, and English, the major school subjects for entrance examinations of high school and college. Besides, the class size in this kind of cram schools is usually very large, consisting more than 100 students per class, and one of the instructional features in the schools is that various tests and tutorial problem exercises are frequently administered (Tsai & Kou, 2007).
This classification of cram schools is useful, but it simply sketches some of the main institutionalized accesses to English learning. There are actually also other options for English learning. For example, more and more parents choose to hire an English tutor for their children since they believe one-on-one tutoring sessions can be more effective to help with their children’s learning difficulties. More and more small-scaled language institutes have also popped up to offer smaller-sized or one-on-one classes.
To conclude, there are diverse after-school private language institutes in Taiwan that attend to different students’ needs or to meet parents’
requirements/expectations. Since attending private language institutes is such a wide spread phenomenon in Taiwan, any investigations on Taiwanese English learning would have to include a discussion on this aspect of the learner’s experience.
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Study Abroad for Further Education
Study abroad (SA) was defined by Kinginger (2009) as “a temporary sojourn of pre-defined duration, undertaken for educational purposes (p. 11).” Research on studying abroad (SA) has many facets, including the impact on language skill improvements (Cubillos et. al., 2008; Kang, 2014), changes in degree of foreign accent (Munoz & Llanes, 2014), identity issue identity issue (Kinginger, 2004) or the change of learner beliefs (Amuzie & Winke, 2009; Kaypak & Ortactepe, 2014; Kim
& Yang, 2010; Yang & Kim, 2011). This research mostly focuses on the outcomes of SA, or the effects SA have on the language learner. Wang (2010) argues that
documenting and interpreting what happens before, during, and after studying abroad can be valuable for SA research.
In Taiwan, according to the statistics provided by the Minister of Education, from 2013-2017, approximately 0.2 % people choose to study abroad, and the United States of America is the first priority; however, in the recent 5 years, the number of people who go to Japan and Australia increases most. The statistics implies that although America is still Taiwanese students’ top choice, more and more people choose other Asian countries such as Japan, or Australia for further education.
Several studies have documented Taiwanese students’ SA experiences, and the research topics include the shift of learner identity (Huang, 2017), communicative experiences (Mullaney, 2017), the interface between naming and identity (Chen, 2012), and anxiety in English learning (Wang, 2009). The studies mainly discuss the issue of learner identity or learners’ willingness to communicate. In the present research, similar issues were addressed as well, but the researcher was particularly
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interested in how the participant changed while encountering different scenarios in the SA context within the frame of sociocultural theory, especially through the lens of agency.
To View English Learning Process through the Lens of Agency
The concept of agency has been discussed in many disciplines, and the most widely cited definition of agency comes from Ahearn (2001), who referred to agency as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (p 112). Agency, as Dufva and Aro (2015) noted, “has been theorized and studied particularly within the Neo-Vygotskian, or sociocultural, point of view” (p. 37). Sociocultural theory (SCT) is rooted in the works of L. S. Vygotsky, and the perspective argues that all human psychological processes are considered social in nature; that is, human development, or learning, is not strictly cognitivist, or happening “in the head” (p. 2), but emerges through social experience (Meskill, 2013). Under this framework, learners are no longer seen as passive recipients of specific knowledge; rather, learners are actually “active agents”
(Meskill, 2013, p. 4), and the practice of learning is a “in the world” (p. 2)
phenomena in which the larger historical and contextual elements are all associated with the learning activity and need to be taken into consideration. How learners exercise their agency to cope with different challenges in the learning contexts therefore become crucial issues to explore.
van Lier (2010) defined agency as “movement, a change of state or direction, or even a lack of movement where movement is expected” (p. 4). That is, if a person wants to do something, he or she will take some real actions. However, it does not
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mean that each person will always perform the action when he or she is expected to do so; in fact, refusing to do something is also a kind of agentive action. This concept indicates the inseparability of learning and agency. As van Lier (2010) further
elaborated, “the employment of agency depends on a learning-conducive environment that allows and instigates a diversity of manifestations of agency at different levels”
(p. 5).
To gain a clearer picture of when and where agency emerges, van Lier (2008) drew on six extracts of classroom learning situations and suggested that “agency is situated in a particular context and that it is something that learners do, rather than something that learners possess;” to put it differently, agency is presented as learners’
behavior in context rather than property (p 163). van Lier thus proposed three core features of learner agency: “(1) Agency involves initiative or self-regulation by the learner; (2) Agency is interdependent, that is, it mediates and is mediated by the sociocultural context; (3) Agency includes an awareness of the responsibility for one’s own actions vis-à-vis the environment, including affected others” (p.172).
Several studies have investigated foreign language learner agency in different educational contexts (Xiao, 2014; Coffey, 2013; Chang, 2011; Gao, 2010; Stanfield, 2015). For example, focusing on agentive experiences with distance education, Xiao (2014) examined the role agency plays in the learning process of a distant language learner in China. Based on an in-depth analysis on interview data, the findings
showed that learner agency is important in constructing one’s new identity, enhancing self-efficacy, maintaining motivation, and exercising metacognitive thinking and actions. On the other hand, in terms of agency in study abroad contexts, Chang (2011)
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studied how agency and imagined community influence nonnative English-speaking (NNES) doctoral students’ selection of learning investments when studying abroad.
Four major aspects were presented in the findings, including funding versus academic progress, coping with diminished social network, overcoming language barriers, and strengthening disciplinary-specific competence. The results showed that choices of where and how they made investments were guided by individual learner agency and personal academic aspirations.
As to how agency plays a role in multiple contexts, Gao’s study is particularly inspiring. Drawing on the sociocultural perspective of language learning, Gao (2010) conducted a longitudinal study to investigate the roles of agency in the strategy use of Chinese EFL learners as they moved between Mainland China and Hong Kong. The results suggested that the learners’ will and capacity to act or agency had a lot to do with their strategy use, and their strategy use reveals their agency in the learning process.
The above-mentioned studies indicated that although learner agency interacts with learner’s learning process in different aspects, there is one thing for sure that the exert of learner agency is profoundly associated with the actions they make, whether it is related to their learning investments or learning strategy use. Nevertheless, little research has investigated how learners exercise their agency as they move across multiple contexts, and how they make sense of the language through the frame of learner agency. Although Gao’s (2010) study investigated learners who crossed two learning contexts, Mainland China and Hong Kong, the researcher put more emphasis on the interplay between learner agency and the learning strategy use, not how the
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learners exerted agency differently moving across multiple contexts. In the present study, the participant’s language learning history crossed three contexts, including formal educational English learning contexts and informal contexts in Taiwan as an EFL learning environment, and overseas context where English is used as the first language. I would like to examine the changing agency and the interaction between the participant and the contexts she was engaged in.
The present study documented the learning experiences that a Taiwanese EFL learner, Erin, had in the past and in the sojourn in the U.K. as a Master’s student. I am especially interested in how Erin employed her agency differently across various contexts and what roles that learner agency plays in her learning process. Using narrative inquiry, I attempted to elucidate what it is like for her to learn English in Taiwan and the changes of her perceptions of English in her own English learning process, and how she makes sense of the language while studying abroad in England.
The specific research questions were as follows:
1. What are the EFL learning experiences that Erin had in Taiwan before study abroad?
2. What are the experiences Erin had while studying in the U.K. during her pursuit of a Master’s degree?
3. What is the role that agency plays in Erin’s learning process, and how does she exercise learner agency to cope with the challenges and various scenarios in the different learning contexts: Taiwan and the U.K.?
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