On May 10th, Jelena Marjanovic, GREIP PhD candidate, presented a workshop with her colleague Anna Tonkikh at the 17th ELTA conference in Belgrade, entitled “Turning screenagers into agents of their own learning”. Learner agency, a crucial component of autonomous learning and hence one of the key competences for the 21st century, was analysed in this study focusing on learner-initiated constructive diversion of task execution. The participants were teenage EFL students who needed to autonomously build a conversation via a voice recording feature of the popular texting app WhatsApp, out of class. The workshop focused first on briefly describing the agentive behaviours these learners engaged in and the potential positive effect on learning outcomes, before moving to demonstrate the task design and its implementation in practice.
