An ecological perspective on learner agency: The case of Chinese tertiary-level EFL students in peer reviews

Learner agency has gained increasing attention in feedback research. Previous studies have explored it from learner identity, social and power relation, and learning behavior, while they mainly focused on students' agency toward teacher feedback. How students enact their agency when engaging in peer reviews in multifaceted contexts over time remains under-explored. Adopting an ecological perspective, this case study longitudinally examined agency enactment of five Chinese tertiary-level EFL students in peer reviews during a 12-week English writing course by analyzing data collected from reflective journals and semi-structured interviews. The results showed that students' agency in peer reviews could be manifested by their proactivity of self-regulated learning and reciprocity of peer interactions when engaging with peer reviews. Learner beliefs, prior experiences, language proficiency, expectations and goals interacted with the contextual factors at the textual, interpersonal and interactional, instructional and sociocultural levels, out of which teacher instruction was the most salient affordance and time shortage was the most salient constraint to agency enactment. This study demonstrated the complexity of the enactment of learner agency and the unique pattern of the chordal triad of agency in the longitudinal peer reviews, and offered pedagogical implications about how to build a more agency-supportive L2 writing class.