Understanding Learner Agency Across Learning Contexts: Comparative Perspectives of Indonesian Preservice Teachers and Vietnamese EFL Students

In sociology, psychology, and education, the concept of agency has been investigated in various aspects of teaching and learning activities, in the forms of human agency, professional agency, employability agency, and learner agency. This study focuses on learner agency and aims to understand it across two learning contexts: preservice teachers (PST) in Indonesia and English as Foreign Language (EFL) students in Vietnam. Previous studies on learner identity have largely tended to discuss contextual conditions, social agents, learning goals, learning process, and decision making. However, there is scant research on understanding learner agency with a comparative perspective of learners that include both PSTs and EFL students. This chapter deploys a qualitative approach to understand learner agency in these two learning contexts. Two Indonesian PSTs and two Vietnamese EFL students were selected from two larger samples. The findings reveal that all four learners were agentic actors in identifying the challenges and implementing strategies to solve the problems. Additionally, the orientation of solving problems can be either independent or dependent, which can be explained by learners’ past experiences and socialisations. Moreover, the actions of four learners in solving problems reflected their motivation arising from a complex set of extrinsic and intrinsic forces. In general, a certain level of learners’ engagement in solving problems reflected a certain level of identity commitment. This study argues that more research is necessary to explore how learners across different learning contexts exercise their agency to realise their learning goals.