Agency
“Agency is a term borrowed from social sciences (see for example Taylor 1977, Frankfurt 1988, Belz 2002).
Here it is appropriated to mean something similar to the agent of a passive sentence, that is, in the words
of some grammarians, the person or thing 'that does'. A lot of the time, in some classes, students have
things done to them and, as a result, risk being passive recipients of whatever is being handed down. J
J Wilson suggests that wherever possible students should be allowed to make decisions. He wants to
give students ownership of class materials, letting them write on the board or control the CD player, for
example.
Teachers might allow students to tell us when and if they want to be corrected in a fluency activity rather
than always deciding ourselves when correction is appropriate and when it is not. We might have students
tell us what words they find difficult to pronounce rather than assuming they all have the same
difficulties.”
(HARMER, Jeremy. The practice of English language teaching. London: Longman, 2006.)