Purpose
This study investigates the developmental trajectory of personal agency in a young EFL learner during an eight-week shared reading program. It explores how the learner moved from socially guided participation toward more proactive and self-directed engagement, as he progressively enacted agency within a socially mediated shared reading context. Particular attention is given to how classroom and home literacy experiences provided conditions that enabled this development.
Main Theories or Conceptual Frameworks
Grounded in Bandura’s (2001) social cognitive theory, the study adopts four core dimensions of personal agency– intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness– as its analytical framework. These dimensions guided the coding and interpretation of the learner’s behaviors across classroom and home settings, allowing for a process-oriented analysis of how agency was enacted and developed over time.
Research Design/Methods/Participants
Using a qualitative single-case study design, the research followed a nine-year-old beginner EFL learner, Andy, over eight weeks of shared reading practice. The first five weeks focused on classroom-based shared reading, followed by three weeks of home-based rereading. Data sources included classroom recordings, teacher logs, semi-structured interviews, and over 800 LINE messages documenting home-based interactions. Through a systematic analysis of multi-source data, the study traced the learner’s evolving patterns of agentive participation across contexts.
Research Findings or Conclusions
Findings reveal that Andy’s agency evolved from externally guided participation to increasingly internalized self-regulation. During the initial five weeks, his engagement was closely aligned with structured teacher support. Subsequently, Andy demonstrated a recursive monitor-adjust-reimplement-reevaluate cycle; for instance, he identified comprehension gaps (monitoring) and applied classroom-learned strategies to mark complex words (adjusting). These behaviors extended to the home context, where he voluntarily initiated rereading sessions and shared personal interpretations (reimplementing), ultimately validating these strategies through enhanced self-efficacy (reevaluating). The evidence suggests that learner autonomy and literacy ownership were progressively enacted, while cross-contextual social mediation provided conditions that supported this development.
Theoretical or Practical Insights/Contributions/Recommendations
The study offers empirical insight into how the four dimensions of agency are enacted within an early-stage EFL literacy context. Practically, it highlights that shared reading– when integrated with structured teacher guidance and responsive parental involvement– can create conditions that facilitate the development of agency and reading ownership. The study recommends that teachers and caregivers engage learners through dialogic reading and open-ended questioning to create sustained, interactive reading experiences that support the development of agentic learning.