Constructing and Negotiating Agency and Identity of English Language Learners: A Teacher-

Student Driven Language Curriculum Materials Development Project

English language learning where the language is not used outside the language classroom is always
site of struggle in which both agency and identity interweave one another (Hadzantonis, 2013).
Particularly in the secondary education sector, many Indonesian teachers lament unpleasant classroom
realities. To begin with, students do not engage in texts and tasks that teachers provide. The teachers
blame that the students are unmotivated to read the texts and perform tasks because they are lazy to
do so. In addition, some students keep silent in the language classroom. Teachers do not see any
observable behaviors that students really learn or engage in classroom activities. The teachers judge
that the students are cognitively incapable and introvert. The students do not feel confident to
participate in classroom activities. Another classroom reality that teachers face up is that the mandated
classroom materials dictate what and how they teach and the ways students learn. Framed in the
prescribed curriculum, students cannot voice what and how they learn best based on their own needs
and interests. Moreover, most of the English teachers complain that most of the students are not willing
to communicate in English; they would rather speak their first language.

From a policy maker perspective, both teachers and students fail to implement the mandated
curriculum and still struggle with meeting standards of achievements. Policy makers stick to
standardization in which students have to master prescribed competency standards. Whether they fail
or succeed in language learning relies upon these educational standards without looking at diverse
classroom realities. In this respect, policy makers play roles as producers of policy and curriculum
materials, which control what and how to teach and learn. These educational realities indicate
conflicting needs and interests among policy makers, teachers, and students. So far, the success of
English language programs in the secondary education sector remains seen from the general
perspectives of language curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in which positivist orientations
dominate the design and implementation of language policy and planning, pedagogy, and assessment.
The competence of language learners is merely judged from policy makers and teachers perspectives;
the learners are viewed as objects and subjects of language learning whose task is to meet educational
standards and to pass educational testing so that they can be considered as successful learners. For
these reasons, in practice, both agency and identity of these learners are not well recognized in the
educational landscape. Both policy makers and English teachers do not yet look critically at both
learner agency and identity. They overlook what engagement, language learning, competences, and
achievements mean to English learners. In other words, they do not make critical sense of these
aspects, but they resist on adopting prescribed educational standards. In response to these, there is an
urgent need for investigating the construction of learners agency and identity through a negotiated
pedagogic practice. One of these ways is to engage the learners in the design and implementation of
teacher-learner driven curriculum materials.

The present study tries to contribute to a growing body of research on the importance of learner agency
and construction of learner identity in relation to language learning (Adawu & Martin-Beltrn, 2012).
Despite this growing body of research, more research is needed to shed light on how learners make
sense of agency and identity construction in language curriculum development processes. Previous
studies (Gu, 2010; Park, 2012; Rezaei, Khatib, & Baleghizadeh, 2014) on the construction of English
learner agency and identity have primarily employed questionnaire surveys, narratives, and interviews
to uncover how the construction of both agency and identity is perceived and practiced, but there is a
lack of ethnographic action research examining how the construction and negotiation of agency and
identity are enacted in the actual language classroom and situated in the school-based language
curriculum development (see Gu, 2010). Using an ethnographic action research design, the present
research study, which takes on a critical-emancipatory paradigm (Banegas, 2011), examines how
English students construct and negotiate their agency and identity while engaging in the design and
implementation of the curriculum materials such as lesson units as teacher-student driven classroom
materials. The current research project, part of a larger study, attempts to transform prescribed
curriculum-oriented and teacher-centered pedagogic practices, transform the way students see their
own learning as emancipatory engagement, and invigorate pedagogic practices and environments that
make student learning more meaningful and emancipatory.

During the fieldwork, both the teachers and the students engaged in the processes of language
classroom materials development and implementation. Data in the study were garnered from group
discussions, interviews, classroom observations, and students written reflections. These research
instruments examine the construction of agency and identity of the students over a period of 12 months.
All the data are qualitatively analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), Hallidays (1978)
social semiotic analysis, and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003). Drawing on these analyses,
the present article reports on four key findings: (1) the value of engagement and collaboration; (2) the
negotiation of curriculum materials: processes and outcomes; (3) negotiating differing roles of students:
challenges and opportunities; and (4) students perceptions/stories of negotiated and participatory
learning. These findings offer an evidence-based proposal for language curriculum innovation/renewal
where students voices are heard, and both teachers and students are viewed as agents of change.
The nature of the relationship between teacher and students is collaborative and emancipatory. As a
whole, investigating the design and implementation of language curriculum materials from agency and
identity perspectives invigorates the field of TESOL where students agency and identity are well
recognized. Thus, the current research study emphasizes how knowledge, agency, identity, and
practice complement one another.

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