Learners' Agency in a Facebook-Mediated Community

Agency, defined by Gao (2013) as learners' "dynamic strategic behavior" (p. 29) in response to contextual realities, has been central to educational undertakings. While the affordances of social networking sites like Facebook have been extensively examined in a number of educational studies, there has been a scarcity of research on critically appraising language learners' agency in the Facebook community. By exploring learners' agency, this study aims to unveil language learners' self-regulation, autonomous action, and decision-making. Five Taiwanese third-year English majors were recruited as case subjects for the qualitative inquiry. They participated in an extracurricular project for vocabulary learning in Facebook. Data triangulation comprised a set of pre- and post-vocabulary tests to investigate their progress in acquiring academic words, an open-ended questionnaire for their perceptions of the online learning experience, and the data of their postings and interactions in this Facebook community. Results from the in-depth interview reveal that learner agency in vocabulary learning via Facebook depends on their strategically selecting (1) academic words to post, (2) Google images to illustrate the referred words, and (3) online dictionary definitions. In addition, interactiveness and responsiveness among the Facebook community members support the creation of an "affinity space" (Gee, 2003) for the learners that stimulates a critical awareness of their self-regulation and learner autonomy. The pedagogical implication is that the Facebook-mediated community can enhance the interactive learning activity. [For full proceedings, see ED564162.]