No abstract

This qualitative study explores Korean high school students’ exercising of agency in processing and producing L2 writing. Data were collected from off-line and online interviews, field notes, and other written materials over the course of two years and analyzed from a social view of agency (Ahearn, in: Jaspers, Östman, Verschueren (eds) Society and language use, John Benjamin Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 2010; van Lier in Sociocult Theory Teach Second Lang 163:186–193, 2008). The students’ engagement in varied L2 writing projects and their writing artifacts consistently showed their enhanced awareness of linguistic and other semiotic resources which resulted in their frequent and continuous use of multiple languages and other placed resources. Meanwhile, they developed their strategies and reshaped their L2 writing practices considering the given context, placed resources, and their funds of knowledge. Findings from this study provide valuable insights into the open possibilities of EFL students’ exercise and development of agency, which is an increasingly necessary feature of life-long learners in the post-pandemic era.

No abstract

Given the call for more research on migrant workers’ L2 investment and agency, this five‐year longitudinal case study followed the Korean language learning experiences of Iroda, a migrant worker who moved from Uzbekistan to South Korea, focusing on how and why she exercises her agency and invests in her L2 learning. Drawing upon the conceptual frameworks of agency, “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn, 2010, p. 28), and investment, which leads to an increase in an individual’s social power and cultural capital (Darvin & Norton, 2015), data was collected from various sources and inductively analysed over five years by using the constant comparative method and the individual‐level logic model. The findings show that Iroda agentively and voluntarily seeks out resources to expand her linguistic repertoire, devoting entire weekends to learning the Korean language while balancing her efforts with her weekday job. As her Korean proficiency grows, she endeavours to apply for a graduate programme at a Korean university to enhance her social status, career prospects, and earning potential for herself and her children. Notably, the findings suggest that her purposeful and agentic investment in L2 learning is driven by the growing acceptance and recognition of her potential within the target society.

T he advancement and proliferation of digital technologies have enabled us to expand and change the ways we read, write, and communicate across time and space. For instance, digital tools and media allow many language learners to collaboratively generate a Google Doc, as well as make and share a YouTube video with a wide audience, participate in discussions on social networking sites, and communicate via video or text message platforms. As such, digital technologies have increased the kinds of digital literacies 1 available, accelerated the pace of digital literacy engagement, and increased the complexity and multiplicity of meaning-making in digital environments (Bhatt, de Roock, & Adams, 2015;Hafner, 2018).1 By digital literacies, we refer to "the practices of communicating, relating, thinking and 'being' associated with digital media" (Jones & Hafner, 2021, p. 17). We use the term, "digital literacies research" in a broad sense that it includes the work on both L1 and L2 digital literacies. Yet, this paper will focus on digital literacies in applied linguistics research.