Book Review: Jian Tao and Xuesong (Andy) Gao, Language Teacher Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2021, 176 pages. ISBN 978-1108932769 (Paperback)

Second language (L2) teacher education has witnessed a substantial shift of attention and orientation with regard to the way it looks at teaching, teachers, and various teacher-related factors. This consequential drift began to occur in the 1970s, a decade branded by Freeman (2002) as the decade of change where teacher education was in the van of the quest for a cognitive paradigm, in lieu of the behaviorist tradition, in which the mental lives of teachers were also taken into account. The shift has continued in an evolutionary fashion, and teachers, couched within the new tradition, are deemed to be both cognitive actors and reflective practitioners. As a reflective being, a teacher is also viewed as “an agentic social ‘subject’: individuals with identities, knowledges, and experiences who are themselves engaged in an evolving trajectory of professional development” (Cross, 2020, p. 38). As a corollary of this teacher repositioning, the notions of agency and, by implication, language teacher agency (LTA) have become a regular fixture of inquiry in both mainstream and L2 teacher education. To be sure, in terms of theorization, the construct is still in need of clarification as there is no univocal consensus on what exactly constitutes agency (Mansouri, et al., 2021). Moreover, it is sensible to consider whether agency is merely another fashionable concept in the language teaching enterprise with no positive and useful contribution to the realities of the teaching practice, or whether teachers’ involvement with agency will lead to the betterment of their professional development practices. Language Teacher Agency is a well-timed publication making a crucial contribution to these concerns.