TEACHER AGENCY WITH MOBILE ENHANCED RESPONSE SYSTEMS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

The study addresses foreign language teaching (FLT) practice facilitated by mobile enhanced response systems, taking Teacher Agency as theoretical grounding [1, 2]. The aim of this ecologically rooted theoretical and conceptual framework is to understand achievement of agency and ability of teachers to act as agents of educational change. Teachers of English as a foreign language in Norway (one class) and in Russia (two classes) participated in a joint MALL (Mobile Assisted Language Learning) research project from November 2013 to February 2014. All teachers used the same mobile based response systems (PeLe and SRS, both developed by the HiST team at Sor-Trondelag University College, Norway) with learners at the same level of language competences (B1-B2 of the Common European Common Framework of Reference for Languages). Data gathered through an open ended survey on teachers' representations on their practice inform the degree of achievement of agency of participating teachers. Motivators and constraints regarding the capacity to act autonomously in a complex socio-technical environment comprising paper and digital (including mobile) artifacts are discussed. The study revisits the teacher agency framework by situating it in a mobile learning context and calls for more in-depth investigation on the beliefs, values and practices of teachers as agents of educational change while linking it to a broader teacher development context.