The following provides an abridged version of a paper titled ‘Problematising Students’ Agency in the Internationalisation of Higher Education’ I recently published in Critical Studies in Education. The full paper can be found in the following link: https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2023.2171451

In this paper, a critical ecological linguistic perspective is used to problematise the relationship between agency and structure in South Korean students’ high school and Higher Education (HE) English-Medium Instruction (EMI) experiences. In December 2014 the Ministry of Education in South Korea announced plans to change the English component of the CSAT exam (College Scholastic Ability Test, known in Korean as Suneung 수능) from a relative to an absolute grading system. This change took effect from November 2017. This decision was motivated by a desire to improve high school students’ communication skills instead of training them to solve CSAT questions (Lee, 2019), to ease the pressure students felt their English score would have in determining their future places in universities (Yoon, 2014), and to reduce expenditure on private English education which is estimated to amount to 15 trillion won (US$ 15.8 billion) a year in South Korea (Jeon, 2012). However, as a result of the change and less spending on CSAT English preparation, students are entering universities with lower English proficiencies (Shin, 2018) while still being required to take portions of their curriculum in the English language to graduate.

Tan and Yang (2021) make use of Torfing’s (1999) dialectics of ‘path-shaping’ and ‘path-dependency’ as theoretical constructs to analyse South Korean exam-orientation policy and the relationship between agents and contextual factors. To understand if students have the opportunity to ‘shape’ their dominant policy paths, this paper problematises (Foucault, 1984) how students’ past schooling experiences affect their EMI experiences; and, in particular, how students’ agency affects their EMI experiences?

The data presented in the paper were generated, as part of a larger project, through semi-structured interviews with ten students majoring in business or engineering at a leading, research-intensive University in Seoul, South Korea. Four questions were investigated which focused upon (1) support for EMI, (2) past experiences of EMI, (3) pedagogical interactions and (4) access to subject content.

The study was based on three analytical starting points. The first,  ‘Passive Agency Theory’ (Williams, 2016) describes how students, as present active agents, make choices that are shaped by the prevailing constraints in their environment. The second, Giddens’s (1984) ‘Structuration Theory’ where agency and power exist in a ‘duality of structure’, whereby rules and resources influence action. The third, the notion of linguistic capital - from Bourdieu’s (1991) Social Capital Theory – which is conceptualised as language resources available to an agent and the values that an agent will connect to each resource.

A theory of Situated Linguistic Capital emerged from analysis to conceptualise how in EMI situations students’ agency is influenced by the degree of trust they have in a L1 or L2 linguistic code. Thus, trust in a L1 or L2 linguistic code exists as linguistic capital in different situations. Within the theory, situated linguistic capital is conceptualised as a construct within an ecology that a degree of trust creates and from which affordances flow.

Within top-down dominant policy paths, students are constrained as they are bound by the structure. In high school they are constrained as they are unable to develop their productive English skills. Then later, in the HE EMI context, this constraint leads to a lack of trust in their situated linguistic capital as they are unable to capitalise on an affordance to learn when the English language is used exclusively for accessing subject content. To overcome these constraints is it important to consider whether students can break free from their past experiences of passive agency?

To suggest answers to the above question and the questions that have guided this study, in the repertoire of the South Korean English language learner, the potential to change or challenge the prevailing constraints is limited. In the case of the South Korean high school English, and HE EMI educational systems, the stable paths are not disrupted as students’ choices are shaped by the prevailing constraints of their ecology; in other words, their actions perpetuate the stable structure. Returning to Torfing’s (1999) dialectics of ‘path-shaping’ and ‘path-dependency’, students’ agency is governed by the ‘path dependency’ of their social context (see also Van Lier, 2008). Therefore, students’ acting potential is being shaped by the constraints instead of them shaping it which is to their detriment.

The paper concludes by arguing that to provide students with more acting potential spaces need to be provided, through socially just pedagogies, in the structure of the linguistic market where the linguistic capital of students and content instructors in either L1 or L2 can be valued across different situations.  

References

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Harvard University Press.

Foucault, M. (1984). Polemics, politics and problematizations. In P. Rainbow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader, (pp. 381-390). Pantheon.

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society; outline of the theory of structuration. Polity Press.

Jeon. M.-H. (2012). English immersion and educational inequality in South Korea. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 33(4), 395-408.

Lee, Y.-S. (2019). Implementing a policy of absolute grading for CSAT English in Korea: A case of politically embedded test (in Korean). English Teaching, 74(2), 3-25.

Shin, J.-H. (2018). 4 out of 10 successful candidates enter Seoul National University with the CSAT English grade 2 or lower (in Korean). Hankook Ilbo News. Retrieved from https://news.naver.com/main/read.naver?mode=LSD&mid=sec&oid=469&aid=0000276529&sid1=001

Tan C., & Yang, J.-A. (2021). Path-dependency or path-shaping? An analysis of the policy to target exam-orientation in South Korea, Critical Studies in Education, 62(2), 195-210.

Van Lier, L. (2008). Agency in the classroom. In J.P. Lantolf, & M.E. Poehner (Eds.), Sociocultural theory and the teaching of second languages. (pp. 163-186). London: Equinox.

Williams, D. G. (2016). Understanding the interplay between context and agency in a South Korean high school English classroom. TESOL International Journal, 11(1), 15-34.

Yoon, S.-M. (2014, August 27). In future, no curve for scoring of English CSAT. Korea JoongAng Daily. Retrieved from http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2994162