Conclusion: The study yielded five empirical practices which promote learner agency in an EFL context: (1) literacy learning, (2) culture exploration, (3) virtual communicative experience, (4) language production, and (5) language engagement. With the conceptualization of a new pedagogical eduscape, teaching and learning in a pandemic situation have shaped a new paradigm. Based on the characteristics of intentional learning that this study reflects, teachers should encourage language learners to value their time by self-directing themselves to engage and experience activities, programs, tasks, engagements, and interactions that are relevant to the accomplishment of language competence. The teacher’s role is therefore a paramount factor in providing instruction to assure those intentional-based movements occur.
Letting learners be more autonomous to carry out tasks of learning as well as engage in an interesting, relevant, secure, and fun activity are examples of student-centeredness that teachers should believe in (Richards, Gallo & Renandya, 2001). In the light sheds from this study, it is now compelling to argue that the continuous ELT teachers’ professional development programs need to be revisited. The term ‘social’ carries out its complexity that normal ELT teaching is ineffective in isolated, critical, limited learning situations. Teachers need to be equipped with the ‘sense of crisis’ awareness which enables them to be well-prepared for any unpredicted and situational pedagogical contacts. In doing so, teachers have to move away from treating the English language as a static, top-down, monolithic motion of entity, leaving a big hole gap between verbal and spatial repertoire.
More agentive communication and interaction are needed such as “social agents, objects, and bodies in layered spatiotemporal scales; all of which constitute an assemblage of situated and emergent activities” Canagarajah (2017:48). Based on this paradigmatic shifting, ELT practices should widen its epistemological perspectives by valuing more the learners’ interaction as freely engaged. Classroom context is no longer suitable as a consideration to design pedagogical efforts. Any instruction that projects learning adventure must be socially appropriate and feasible for learners (Leung, 2005).
This study signifies that the learner agency present in every learner should be benefited from appropriate learning instruction. Carrying out proper pedagogical practices as a response to the current remote learning situation is fundamental to avoiding learning loss. Teachers’ intentions to develop literacy skills, creative practices, interactive activities, productive processes, and an alternative assessment are foremost as a means to promote learner agency. The new eduscape with covid-19 must not only see as a limitation, instead, but it is also adventitious to optimize the output of language learning by utilizing learners’ social identity in social media and family with foreign language learning purposes.
It is evident in this study that learners did not invest their process and progress in language learning only in personal efforts. Instead, the subjects have shown that their surroundings and environment are fundamental to fostering agentic approaches in EFL learning. The resources of learning then should be shifted from motion-based to mobile-based. Teachers can reformulate their instruction from merely dependant to teachers’ centeredness to more flexible for time and space.
The instructional ground then should be transformed from authoritative to liberate resulting from an intentional eduscape paradigm that enhances doable learning opportunities among learners. This can be an effective framework for teaching foreign languages to follow amidst the uncertainty, and unpredictable times during the world’s restless pandemic or any kind of it.
Disclaimer: Jurnal ini sudah terbit di jurnal The Journal of Asia TEFL Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2024, 425-433. Silakan cek repositori pada academia.edu selengkapnya klik disini.