A Narrative Inquiry Into Novice EFL Teachers’ Agency From The Perspective Of Ecological Affordance Theory

Teacher is the first resource for educational development.Currently,there’re a large number of novice EFL teachers,however,they have encountered many problems such as role transition from being a student to becoming a language teacher.Besides,having insufficient teaching experiences and being confused about their professional identify and future development,which all made their professional development more difficult.To effectively enact teachers’ professional agency is one of the critical ways for novice EFL teachers to deal with the development dilemma(Toom et al.,2015).Therefore,this study employs the ecological affordance theory with the aims to explore the manifestation of three novice EFL teachers’ agency from the perspective of agency belief,agency competence,and agency inclination.It also intends to analyze the influencing factors of novice EFL teachers’ agency from external affordance and internal affordance.Based on the research findings,this study tried to discuss the feasible measures to improve the enactment and development of novice EFL teachers’ agency.To fulfill the above research purposes,three research questions are addressed:1)What are the manifestations of novice EFL teachers’ agency in an ecologicalsystem?2)What influence novice EFL teachers’ agency in an ecological system?3)How to promote the enactment and development of novice EFL teachers’agency in an ecological system?This study adopted qualitative narrative inquiry and selected three novice EFL teachers as the research participants.Data were collected from semi-structured interviews from both teachers and students,classroom observation,and teacher’s reflective journals.Data were later transcribed and encoded where themes were extracted based on the narrative structure.The study revealed that:First,novice EFL teachers enacted their professional agency in three aspects:agency belief,agency competence and agency inclination.Novice EFL teachers articulated their agency beliefs through these dimensions: role obligation,teachers’ authority,professional capacity,as well as the relationship between teaching and learning;they intended to fulfill their aspirations by actualizing their agency competence through a series of aggressive ways of analyzing problems,generating reflections,adjusting strategies,taking opportunities,and conducting active actions;and a series of defensive ways including failure attributing,adjusting self cognition,resetting goals,and implementing substitute practices;they demonstrated their agency inclination as the mediation between their beliefs and practices,although they experienced confusion,burnout and self-doubt,they can compensate for the negative emotions and maintain positive beliefs through positive psychological suggestions,failure attribution and agentic practice.Second,their enactment of professional agency is influenced by the external affordance and internal affordance in their working ecological system.The external affordance consists of the assistance from colleagues,the feedback from students and the resources in their working environment.The internal affordance includes novice EFL teachers’ learning and teaching experience,personal disposition,and future career goals.Only when the ecological affordance is matched to their ability and needs,it can be interpreted as good affordance,and promote novice EFL teachers to take further agentic actions.And teachers’ agentic thought and behaviors could become a part of ecological affordance influencing novice EFL teachers’ professional development and working environment.