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For quite some time, SLA researchers have been preoccupied with the internal mechanisms of interlanguage rather than language learners themselves for their main research focus. Their multiple social roles, identities, unique characteristics, and agency were considered to be of less importance to our understanding of SLA.

Recently, a great deal of attention has been placed on the analysis of sociocultural and political context in which additional language learners' experiences take place. Their roles as social beings and the ways they perceive their L2 worlds, experiences, and themselves are examined.

L2 learning takes place as learners increase their participation in target communities of practice in which their engagement can be facilitated or constrained. These studies refer to the learners' ability to make choices, take control, self-regulate, and pursue their goals as individuals.

Norton proposed the notion of investment. According to him, learners invest in learning a target language hoping that they will acquire certain types of symbolic and material resources that will promote their social, political, and economic status in their communities of practice.

Understanding learner agency within the identity approach is useful for explaining why some highly motivated students do not want to speak or write in the target language, because they do not want to lose their identity. An investment in learning a new language is not simply obtaining knowledge and a set of skills. It is an investment in one's identity.

In this circumstance, L2 learners may exert their agency by resisting undesirable identities imposed on them and striving on constructing a new one that they prefer and aspire to in the future.

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American psychologist, Albert Bandura, defines self-efficacy as an individual's perceptions of "one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments (goals)"

According to him, the core of motivation is agency, the act of making choices with self determination and it's manifested in actions done intentionally.

People set goals for themselves and anticipate the likely consequences of actions. Through the excercise of forethought, people motivate themselves and guide their actions in anticipation of future events and outcomes. Higher self-efficacy correlates to individual's greatest persistence when facing difficulties, exerting more effort and making better use of learning strategies.

Individual's with low self-efficacy may choose not to participate in a learning activity because they perceive themselves to be lacking in the ability to succeed. °Agency can also be collective or proxy. Collective agency: You work together with others toward a shared goal.

There’s mutual effort and shared intentionality.

Proxy agency: You rely on others to act on your behalf.

You’re not necessarily involved in the action, someone else does it for you.

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From a behavioural perspective, motivation can be defined as "the anticipation of reinforcement." A large part of what we do is motivated by and anticipated reward. The question is where the source of such motivation comes from.

Gardner and Lambert used the concept of Integrative and Instrumental motivational orientations, for explaining why people learn languages. Integrative orientations refers to learner's interest in getting to know about the people and culture of the target language. Instrumental orientations is driven by more practical value and advantages gained from learning the target language.

Deci and Ryan (1985,2002) describe motivation as coming from inside individuals. They argue that humans are innately inquisitive and volitional beings without needing external incentives, and that intrinsically motivated actions derive from the desire of a person to accomplish something for his or her own pleasure, while external motivations can pressure a person to think, feel or behave in a specific way, and even may give the person a feeling of being controlled and lead to loss autonomy.

In this way, Brune argue that one of the most effective ways to help learners feeling motivated is to free them from the control of external rewards and punishments. One of the principal weaknesses of extrinsically driven behaviour is that we can become dependent on those tangible rewards, even to the point that their withdrawal can extinguish the desire to learn.

One type or extrinsic reward can have an effect on intrinsic motivation, and this is a sincerely delivered positive feedback in a classroom. This can be seen by students as a validation of their own personal autonomy, critical thinking ability, and self-fulfillment, and can increase or maintain intrinsic motivation.

Another notable development in L2 motivation research is Ushioda’s (2009), who notes that L2 motivation is dynamic and can be mediated socially. It has strong relationship with learner identity and agency because one’s sense of identity and agency depends on actions carried out not only on his or her own but also under the control of other (e.g., peers and teachers).

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We draw on the notion of embodied cognition, also known as situated cognition, to discuss the relationship between the mind and action and how this relationship can be relevant to human agency.

John Dewey (1896) argued that all human activity involves embodied coordination. In other words, perception and action are not causally connected in a linear way. Making sense of perceptual experience and response happens as the individuals engage in the very action.

According to Gibbs (2006), perception is “the ability to derive meaning from sensory experience to guide adaptive behavior”. Agency can manifest in the active process of perceptual learning, that is, learning to perceive particular features and meanings (i.e. affordances) in the environment.

Cultural connection also comes into play in this learning process because individuals may perceive the affordances differently depending on their prior languaculture.
Atkinson (2011) views cognition as adaptive intelligence, which is “an open biological system to align with the environment”.

Language is not simply stored inside the brain; rather it is a multisensory and multimodal experience involving motor patterns as well as auditory and visual information.

Active touch should be emphasized when haptics is examined in an educational setting. For example, having students consciously choose to examine the properties of an object may increase their motivation and attention to learning.

La pedagogía de Pablo Freire reconoce la importancia del cuerpo, la experiencia y la interacción con el mundo como base para el aprendizaje y la liberación. A través de la dialéctica, la pedagogía freireana busca que los estudiantes reconozcan su propia historia y la opresión, utilizando su cuerpo y experiencia como herramientas para la transformación social.

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Cognitive neuroscience has provided a deeper understanding of the human mind as a complex organic system. Recent advances suggest that cognitive processes such as learning, attention, memory, and decision-making are affected by the processes of emotion. Emotion has been emphasized in the fields of psychology and language education but only by a handful of scholars.

Vygotsky observed the connection between cognition and emotion and stressed the importance of the affective and volitional tendency of the human mind in the development of the thought process. In the early 1970s, Brown called for rigorous investigations on the affective domain in L2 education. The significance of emotion in language learning has been marginalized in most SLA textbooks and encyclopedias. (Up until the late 1980s the field of brain research has also ignored the critical role of emotion in influencing social behaviors and the process of making logical and rational decisions).

Antonio Damasio reported his neurological patients, whose frontal lobe and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex were damaged, show "compromised" social behaviors such as being insesitive to others' emotions. On the other hand, these patients displayed no loss of knowledge and were able to explain social and logical rules that guide one's future plans and behaviors. Damasio concludes that the patients' logic and knowledge could be intact, but "factual knowledge about social behavior requires the machinery of emotion and feeling to express itself normally.

Immordino-Yang and Damasio propose that emotion plays a critical role in "bringing previously acquired knowledge to inform real-world decision making in social contexts". Emotion is what makes people enable to engage in sound decision making with a repertoire of know-how and actions that would allow people to respond appropiately in different social situations. Emotion should be grounded for a learner to exercise agency as a desirable member of a community of practice. To ignore the importance of students' emotions is to fail to appreciate a critical force in students' learning.

Neurobiological findings help us understand how beliefs, emotions and learning are influenced by the process of the biological brain interacting with our senses and the physical world. Pavlenko and Driagina's study showed that L2 learners with lower levels of proficiency seem to experience difficulties in using the L2 emotion lexicon and may end up drawing on L1 emotion categories to express themselves in the L2. Some L2 users manifest their agency by keeping two sets of emotional categories and perform according to the constraints of their respective languages. Others may experience L2 influences on their L1 emotion and notice the conceptual shift, starting to "forget" particular concepts and distinctions.

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Due to globalisation, L2 learners are facing a constant evolution in language. Values, ideas, thoughts, emotions are intertwined both, physically and virtually, and in this scenario, human agency is a key element to administrate our dynamic and complex lives.

As language teachers, how can we help our students to develop their identities? As language is a form of social actions, a cultural resource and a sociocultural practice, agency is an act of construction rather thena something someone may possess. Input/output becomes a quite essential element teachers may use to create opportunitites in which students can practice their L2 in real life contexts.

In the previous comment, we mentioned the way in which we may encourage learners to DO language. Now I would like to share with you the subtitle Allow Learners' VOICE to Develop.

As teachers, we must support our students and create opportunities for them to be heard. The students need to use their voices in order to use the language with the aim of sharing experciences, ideas, emotions, etc., which eventually leads to their construction of identity.

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AFFORDANCES: opportunities for meaningful action that a situation leads to; a reciprocal relationship between a person and a particular feature of the environment that signals a possibility for action.

AGENCY: a person´s awareness of his/her own actions and learning process. It is the ability to make choices, take control, self-regulate, self-determinate and self-motivate, and thereby pursue goals as an individual, leading potentially to personal or social transformation.

DYNAMIC SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE: complexity theory, that emphasizes language acquisition as a dynamic process involving nonlinear individual variations.

EMBODIED OR SITUATED COGNITION: recognizes that the mind’s integration with the body´s sensorimotor capacities play crucial roles in the development of cognitive and linguistic abilities, emphasizing that learning is not solely a mental process but is also grounded in physical experience and action.

EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION: driven by external rewards or the avoidance of negative consequences, rather than an inherent enjoyment of the activity itself.

FORETHOUGHT: people exercise forethought, that means, they set their goals, anticipate the likely consequences of actions, and avoid detrimental effects.

HAPTICS:  the study of “touch and the human interaction with the external environment though touch. Human beings’ capacity to process information by touch may be superior to the visual and auditory sensory systems.

IDENTITY: according to Norton, it refers to how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future.

INSTRUMENTAL ORIENTATION: acquiring a language as a means for attaining instrumental goals, such as acquiring a degree or certificate in an academic institution, furthering a career, reading technical material, translation, etc.

INTEGRATIVE ORIENTATION: learning a language in order to integrate oneself into the culture of a second language group and become involved in social interchange in that group.

INTRINSIC MOTIVATION: a crucial element in the cognitive, social, and physical development of humans, and leads to high-quality learning. It is the desire of a person to accomplish something for his or her own pleasure.

INVESTMENT: the learner's dedication of time, effort, and resources towards acquiring a second language, believing that the effort will result in positive returns. This "investment" isn't just about the act of learning, but also about how the learner's identity and social relationships are shaped by their engagement with the language.

LANGUACULTURE: the inseparability of language and culture; “langua” is about discourse, not just about words and sentences, and the “culture” is about meanings that include, but go well beyond what the dictionary and grammar offer.

MOBILITY AND DIVERSITY: these are common features in L2 learners. They may live in a super-diversity space, highly diversified geographical and social spaces due to the multilateral flow of people, ideas, and commodities across borders. Multilingual users mesh their languages, values, and emotions based on a variety or resources.

MOTIVATION: the anticipation of reinforcement. It has to be regulated by learners themselves, rather than regulated by others, in order to be sustained.

SELF-EFFICACY: an individual’s perceptions of one´s own capabilities to perform a specific activity to produce given attainments.

SELF-REGULATION: deliberate goal-directed attempts to manage and control efforts to learn the L2.

SELF-REGULATORY LEARNING STRATEGIES: actions and processes directed at acquisition of information or skills that involve agency, purpose, and instrumentality perceptions by learners. These strategies involve a self-feedback system and a decision-making process to fit an appropriate strategy with a task or objective through self-evaluation.

SYMBOLIC AND MATERIAL RESOURCES:  symbolic resources refer to cultural elements like language, that learners use to make sense of the target language and its associated culture, and to help them in their learning process. Material resources encompass any tool or item used to facilitate the acquisition and understanding of a new language like oral or written texts, games, websites, etc.

THE IDEAL-SELF: refers to the person one hopes to become, and the ought to be self indicates the attributes that one believes one ought to possess to meet those expectations.

VOICE: it is infusing one’s words with one’s own feelings, thoughts, and identity.

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"Language learning is anchored in agency, as all of life is. Teaching, in its very essence, is promoting agency" (Leo van Lier, 2011b,p.391)

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"Agency is the key to understanding who language learners are and why they think and act the way they do. It is the basis for making sense of the complexity of classroom practices".

In ancient times, influenced by the Behaviourist tradition, students were just treated as numbers, passive beings. According to this School of Thought, the role of students was to be a passive receiver. "Students used to do what they did because of external forces and not because of free will".

Later, with Rationalism, the role of students was to be a "thinker"-Autonomous beings. Students begin to think more critically.

Finally, with Constructivism, the role of students was to be active, an "active creator of knowledge". They became the centre of learning.

Over the last few decades there have been rigorous investigations into learner behaviour and performance beyond controlled classrooms looking into the social world of language learners.

Learners are described as AGENTS who are aware of their actions and behaviors and take control over their learning processes. They are volitional, social, evaluative and make conscious decisions using their target languages through appropriation.

In conclusion, we can say that the role of the student has become more central, empowered and autonomous over the last decades. In a certain way, the principle of AGENCY emerged as a response against behaviourist ideas.

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Classrooms should provide opportunities for students to actively use the language (i.e. affordances), instead of focusing only on opportunities for input.

According to Lantolf and Thorne (2006), agency also refers to "the ability to assign relevance and significance to things and events" (p.143)

Thus, the concept of agency includes the ability to perceive affordances.

According to Leo van Lier (2000), affordance is "a reciprocal relationship between an organism and a particular feature of the environment that signals a possibility for action".

From this ecological perspective, even though affordances come from the environment, teachers can mediate them through scaffolding.

It is also important for us as teachers to pay attention to students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds, abilities, and other aspects of their identities, such as their interests and aspirations. In this manner, we avoid stereotyping our students and instead we are able to include more suitable topics and assignments in the classroom.

It is important, subsequently, that we acknowledge that students are complex individuals, with unique identities, and therefore their meaning-making processes are different (paraphrased from Lee, 2008).

To sum up, then:

Teachers may focus on the ways learners can actively perceive affordances in their learning environment, capitalizing on their individual knowledge, skills, and experience.