We present how students’ writing skills develop in relation to the evolution of learner agency by using biographical retrodiction. Narratives of individuals were constructed based on in-depth interviews. The findings suggest complementary roles of agency and writing and benefits of the proposed methodology to understand their dynamic and complex interrelations.
This study explored the complex and dynamic interrelations between L2 writing development and learner agency from the perspective of CDST. Learner agency has been increasingly recognized as a dynamic and complex construct characterized as “relational, emergent, spatially, and temporally situated” (Larsen-Freeman, 2019, p. 73). We investigated how the evolution of learner agency is interrelated with L2 writing development by using a method of biographical retrodiction—aiming to understand the changing experiences of individuals from the accounts they give of their past, present, and future. Through the analysis of these narratives, we identified the end states of each individual and retrospectively examined learner agency as a complex dynamic system nested within a hierarchical set of different levels of contexts across individual’s lifetime. Based on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with two university students before and after a study-abroad experience, their narratives of English learning history were constructed. Their compositions collected before and after the study-abroad period were also analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings suggest that their learner agency emerged and evolved throughout their learning history, and their changing agency made a significant contribution to developing their writing skills. In particular, both learners changed their attitudes towards L2 writing through hardships in the study-abroad context—shifting from seeing the writing as merely a written version of oral English and aiming to achieve ‘native-like’ oral proficiency to recognizing its indispensable function for the ability to develop their ideas in more refined and profound manner. The findings also emphasize the benefits of pairing biographical retrodiction with narrative as a method for in-depth interviews conducted at different times so as to grasp the holistic picture of individual learners while preserving the complexity and dynamics of their learner agency that evolved in the changing contexts in the course of their learning history.
