Edsall, Dominic G; (2024) Social Identities in Transition within the University: EFL Teachers Negotiating Learner Autonomy within Japanese Higher Education. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This research examines how learner autonomy manifests across cognitive and social perspectives in language learning and proposes a new framework bridging the gap between autonomy and agency. This study suggests that learner autonomy is part of the Habitus that students can draw upon in pursuit of agency within a dynamically changing social field, where teachers are also undergoing professional transitional change, and where the field is framed by institutional policies and wider societal trends. I scrutinise the relationships between these different perspectives using empirical evidence from semi-structured interviews with 35 students and 42 EFL teachers from 12 different universities across Japan. I explore how the teachers' own lived experiences shape these conceptions and influence their professional practice. The imperative for this exploration comes from a desire to understand the apparent contradiction of Japanese university students being portrayed in the literature as lacking learner autonomy while also demonstrating individualism and resistance to authority through non-participation. This seeming contradiction and the resultant discursive gap is reflected in the learner autonomy literature. This discursive gap between cognitive and social perspectives is also evident in the wider educational literature as well as in the EFL literature more specifically with little agreement. I present a new framework for analysing learner autonomy that plots its influences and application across different levels from the cognitive level of developmental psychology, self-determination theory and the motivational ideal self, to the broader social level of socio-cultural theory, framing, social capital, and the field. This new framework makes a unique contribution to knowledge in the field by bringing together cognitive and social perspectives of learner autonomy and language learning, such as those of Holec, Dam, and Little, with sociological concepts of framing, Habitus, field, and social capital, such as those of Bernstein and Bourdieu, within the wider educational system.

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